Doll House
by Maeve Riannon
Summary: Kamiya Kaoru is a girl intent to save her dojo´s reputation. Takani Megumi is a doctor with a dark past, and Himura Tomoe is a mysterious woman who wants to forget hers. UPDATED. The much expected confrontation.
1. Chapter One

**Notes: **Hello, people, I´m back! This story is a bit different from what I´m used to do. It´s an AU (thought minor: with certain changes in the timeline and storyline but the same historical period and the same characters) that will be much more intrigue and action-packed than the rest of my stories, while at the same time I try to explore the relationships between certain people in a what-if scenario. I hope you enjoy it.

**Disclaimer: **The characters belong to Watsuki Nobuhiro.

Thanks to Margit Ritzka for betaing this.

**Doll House**

**Chapter One**

**I (November, 1876 ):**

_The woman took a long breath, and fixed her eyes on the sordid ceiling above her head for the last time. Her hand was gripping the dagger strongly, as if to brace herself for the determination she needed while, in the adjoining room, the thumps and shouts were beginning to subside._

**_You dishonoured your family. Dishonoured their profession._**

_It held a strange irony in her eyes, to think that she had spent her childhood and her adolescence trying to make them proud of her. With only that thought in her mind, she had got tangled in her shame and her ruin, and in the end she was killed by the knowledge that they never could forgive her. No matter what she did, it was too late._

**_You have ruined hundreds of people._**

_Megumi watched, almost in fascination, how the blade reflected the dying light of the candle. Before she ever could notice, her eyes were full of tears that blurred her vision and made it hazy. The scars in her soul were bleeding, all of them at the same time. _

_But **why**? Was it fair? She had been innocent when they had tricked her into making that special opium, and when she realised it, it had already been too late. They had kept her imprisoned, had she ever had any other choice?_

Yes_, an inner voice did not fail to answer. _You had it. You had the same choice that you have **now, **but before it would have saved all those people that have died because of you._ Oh, if only she hadn't been a coward, a hypocrite, afraid to die and giving justifications…_

_But well, she smiled grimly to herself, better late than never. She would do it now, and rid both herself of that inhuman torture and the world of her presence. The only thing she regretted about her decision was that the red-haired swordsman's efforts would be in vain, after he had risked his life to save her, but he would understand in time that it was necessary. He had delivered her from that hell, and made her feel loved and even understood for once in all those years, so how could he fail to respect her will now?_

_One… The hands that were gripping the blade were already white from the effort. This time it was the definitive, no second thoughts. _

_Would it… hurt too much?_

**Coward.**_ It would be nothing but a dark, merciful oblivion. It would make her cease seeing those scenes in her mind. And…_

_Two._

_Megumi drew a long breath, and began pulling the blade downwards. No, not like this. Such lack of determination…It had to be quick, immediate, **exact**._

_Now!_

_The sudden noise of the door crashing behind her back interrupted her endeavours abruptly, and caused the dagger to fall to the floor with a clang. The woman smothered a curse, feeling as if she had been forcefully pulled back into a world to which she had already ceased to belong._

_"Megumi-dono!"_

_Her dazed eyes wandered over the figure of the newcomer, and, without knowing well why, shame started to invade her gut. He had several wounds, some of them deep, and his clothes were torn. His expression was one of exhaustion, even as he rushed in with his reversed blade unsheathed in his right hand._

_He had done all this for her. Would she, now…?_

**_But, what else? It was the only way._**

_ "What are you trying to do?"_

_The woman's lips slowly curved into an eerie smile._

_"Justice."_

_"Justice?" The swordsman stopped in his tracks, shaking his head with an expression of deep censure. Megumi used that moment to kneel down and pick up her weapon again. "Justice towards whom?"_

_"Towards the people who died because of my cowardice," she explained, her voice a tiny note smothered from the surprise at the question. Little by little, she started to get defensive. "I'm guilty of their deaths."_

_The man approached her, and when he was side by side with her he suddenly extended his hand to yank the dagger away from her. In disbelieving surprise, she saw it collide with the wall and fall to the floor with a sharp noise._

_"Yes, you are," he said. It was the first time she heard him speak in such a dead serious tone, and she found herself unable to utter any answer or protest. "But who will do justice to all the people who will die for your cowardice now?_

_"What?" _

_"Your death will bring no satisfaction to anyone," he explained." You won't have any opportunity to redress anything, or do justice, or recover anybody's respect as a doctor. But if you lived, you could do justice towards those people by saving many more, and recover your family's honour! You're a doctor, and your knowledge in medicine is precious to save people's lives, now that you're free and the band who used you has dispersed."_

_"Bu…but do you think…?" The woman opened her mouth uneasily, then closed it again and stared at her fingers. Those words were having the strange and unexpected virtue of shaking her to the core, of giving her an irrational hope. Could there be a way to be forgiven, to…** make them proud of her again?**_

_"It's too late," she muttered weakly, as she realised once more the impossibility of her dreams. "I have done too much. Who could ever believe it could be possible to redress wrongs as… horrible as mine? This variety of opium caused the ruin of hundreds of people, and I made it all **myself**! It's surprising, how few words one needs to say it, and the strength of the impact of the truth. The ruin of hundreds of people…"_

_The red-haired man didn't look too impressed by this._

_"How many people do you think that the hitokiri Batotusai killed with his own hands?" he asked. Megumi lifted her head in surprise._

_"Some say hundreds. Others say thousands. Some say he was just a legend that the Ishin Shishi invented to terrorise their enemies. But what…?"_

_"He did far worse deeds than you, but he chose not to give up. He took a non-killing sword, and has wandered through Japan since the war ended, trying to atone for his crimes by helping as many people as he could." His eyes twinkled with some unknown emotion when he peered deeply inside hers. "And though he knows that maybe he will never be forgiven, he keeps trying, to honour the lives of the people who died by his sword and of the people who risked or gave theirs so he could have that opportunity."_

_The woman's expression underwent an abrupt change upon hearing this. Making a step backwards, she extended a hand to point at him, her face as pale as a paper leaf._

_"Y…**you**?" she muttered in disbelief. "The hitokiri…?"_

_"Yes," he nodded, without a flinch. Megumi looked at him closer; he was not lying. His eyes did not evade hers, and he wasn't trying to hide his guilt, but something in his glance effectively spoke to her about his pledge for life that admitted no drawbacks. _

**_Justice…_**

_He had understood her, saved her from the horror of her life, and now he was trying to keep her from doing something terrible. If he had killed himself back then… wouldn't she be now in the same place where she had been for these last three years, trapped in the nightmare and causing the ruin of many? And by helping her…_

**_By helping her, he had done justice to someone else._**

_Overwhelmed, Megumi buried her face in her hands._

_"You're…right." Her voice sounded smothered under the weight of her realisation. "Nobody will benefit from my death. But if I work hard and become a doctor…" She lifted her face slowly, and wiped her tears in a nervous movement. "I might find a measure of peace."_

_The man -the hitokiri!- nodded and gave her a warm smile in which she could read, now at last, his approval and deep understanding of her determination. After having fallen in the abyss of self-destruction only moments before, now she felt comforted and encouraged by that gesture, almost tempted to smile at her previous despair. She wasn't alone. The world wasn't so cruel, even to people like them._

**_It gave her enough to carry on._**

_"And you will honour the Takani family."_

_"Yes," she nodded, more as a promise than as a simple affirmation. And then, in a whispered undertone, she added to herself. "And I will honour you."_

* * *

**II (January, 1865)**

_She slid the shoji open some centimetres, then closed it again with care not to make any noise that could stir the wounded man inside. Her intuition had proved her right; the blizzard had subsided already. Outside their small house, the forest had turned into a peaceful immensity of white fallen snow without boundaries._

**_Now or never, _**_she told herself, pressing a bleeding piece of cloth against the still open wound at her left shoulder and arm. Almost involuntarily, she darted a glance at the unconscious figure lying on the futon, and she felt a shiver shake her body with violence_

_Traitor, traitor, traitor…_

**_Would you ever… forgive…?_**

_He hadn't ever looked more like a child to her eyes than now, betrayed and broken. For a second, her mind was flooded with tantalizing images of his hopeful, happy look while he tended to the daikon in their field, of his gentle smile when he promised her that he would make her happy and stop killing, of his passion when they were in bed that last night…_

_Tomoe fell to her knees and gasped heavily while trying to prevent herself from tearing her eyes out, in an irrational desire to stop seeing that accusing face full of silent desperation. This had been her revenge. And yet no, not even this she had been able to do as she should have… she had broken his spirit, but she had done all she could to save him from his fate. She had been fooled, and she had got in the middle, betraying Kiyosato again. Now they would both haunt her until she died, for her cowardice and for her determination, for her kindness and her cruelty, even for the very fact of having allowed herself to be torn in two. _

_She was slowly going crazy. Oh, yes, she knew. Whenever she felt the need to get close to him and take care of him, comfort him or caress his forehead, she felt Kiyosato's ghost seething behind her, and had to draw back in pain and shame. He had left because of her, because he loved her, and he had died for her, as Tatsumi-san had said. But whenever she wanted to lift her dagger and end it once and for all, her eyes met Kenshin's slight frame, and she let it fall to the floor while her body was wrecked in sobs. She had black circles under her eyes, and she could not stop the trembling of her hands. Her wound throbbed in her left side; maybe already infected, and yet she did not deserve to die any more than she deserved to live. Suffering was all that she deserved._

**_Would it ever end?_**

_Step by step, she approached the futon once more, and knelt at one of its sides. Her husband was starting to get a bit restless, something which announced that he probably would wake up soon enough. As she saw him turn and toss in his bed, she felt a surge of love and compassion tearing her entrails._

_"Kenshin…" she whispered in a trembling voice. Ignoring Kiyosato's ghost, she extended a hesitant hand, and passed it over his hair to quieten him a bit. The adolescent leaned towards it, groaning and whimpering._

_"Tomoe…" he muttered in a distressed tone. "Tomoe…why you? Why…?"_

_The woman's hand froze, just in time before a horrible sensation started to make prey of her limbs and insides. It was like a dull throbbing that increased and increased until she could feel everything within her crumbling down. She was hot, and then she was cold. She was paralysed, and then she felt an overpowering need to run._

**_And she was unable to utter a word._**

_Allowing tears to roll down her cheeks freely for the first time in so many years, Tomoe lowered her face, and kissed her husband's forehead. This action seemed to stir him out of his coma, and a pair of unfocused violet eyes snapped wide open to begin a frantic search for something in their surroundings. Full of an instinctive horror, she got up to slide the shoji open, and began a mad run through the snow._

**_Forgive me… Please… forgive me… Survive… and forget…_**

**_Forget that I existed…_**

* * *

****

**III (March, 1878):**

**_Kamiya Kaoru_**

****

"All right! Now try again!"

The young kendo master watched attentively how the boy performed the movement, and cocked her head in mild disaproval.

"No. You're giving it too much impulse again. You did it better the previous time, why don't you stick to that?"

"But I don't remember how I did it back then anymore!" the student shouted in frustration, as if about to throw a fit. Kaoru tried to relax for both, and scolded herself mentally. After having made him repeat the same thing over a hundred times, could she still expect that he was able to coordinate well?

Blame it all on her mood these last days.

"This is the correct movement," she said, grasping her wooden sword and placing herself in position. "Look."

The strike came out fluidly and precisely, and the other two boys could not help but turn back and look at it with open eyes. Kaoru gave a satisfied grin.

"Now, try to do it once more!"

This time, the student showed not only more determination, but also even somewhat more accuracy. It would be greediness to ask anything more from the day, she decided with a tired gesture.

"Tomorrow we will continue practicing this during the first half an hour. I would suggest that you did exercises with your arms. _You _too," she added to the other two in a warning tone.

"We? But we can do it already…" the tallest of them started to complain. Then, however, he averted his glance, and his voice turned a bit less confident. "Besides… well, I don't know if I'll be able to come tomorrow."

Kaoru put her hands on her hips.

"And why not?"

"I… have things to do," he muttered, not very sure. Even from where she was, the young woman could easily guess that he was lying.

"And the truth?"

"It's true." For some instants he stayed there, facing the ground, but he snapped out of it with a brusque movement. "I have to to go. Good afternoon, Kamiya-sensei!"

"He… hey, wait!" Kaoru realised that she was shouting to an already disappeared student, and leaned back in annoyance. "Oh, wonderful! Could any of you tell me what's the matter with him and his attitude?"

The other two boys were already following their companion's footsteps, chatting among themselves and pretending they hadn't heard her. But that was definitely too much for Kaoru. She wasn't going to tolerate such behaviour… and, above all, she wasn't going to wait until tomorrow to get an answer.

"I have asked you a question!" In quick motion, she got to the door, and stood menacingly in the middle of their way. The boys stopped in their tracks with a jump, and instinctively turned to look at each other's face.

"What… do we know?" the one who had had problems getting the movement right asked in an innocent voice. "I don't know what's happening inside his house or inside his head, for the matter!"

"It's because of that impostor, isn't it?"

Unfortunately enough, the question seemed to hit the target with accuracy, causing a visible effect in both students.

"Well…"

"Yoshimatsu-kun isn't going to come back, right?"

Silence felt sickening in the dojo for a long while. Little by little, the boy who hadn't yet spoken managed to recover his capacity of speech, and drew a sharp intake of breath.

"The other day a man was murdered by Battousai," he said. "People are talking because he says that he studied in this dojo…"

"It's a lie!" Kaoru exploded. "A sick lie! You know that the Kamiya Kasshin Ryuu is a non-killing technique!"

"We know," the other boy nodded, maybe a bit… intimidated. "But I've already got into two arguments with my family to remain here. And Yoshi-kun… I think they've already made him leave."

"I try to leave my house only when my mother is minding her own business, of late," the first chimed in again. "Nothing better than starting to exercise in front of them and bring _the_ question back!"

Kaoru's knuckles went white around the handle of her sword. She was unable to utter a sound, during a long instant in which she searched for the adequate words to put in her mouth, but finally she had to shrug propriety aside. She was boiling.

"Know that I'm going to hunt for that criminal by every single Tokyo street!" she shouted, kicking the shoji wide open in fury. "If you feel brave enough, come with me… if not, I'll go alone!"

Her two remaining students avoided her glance, and crossed her side at a quick pace.

After she had bolted the door of the dojo, Kaoru returned to her home in a quick, stormy stride. This was just too much. To keep the dojo going after her father's death, accepting boarders in her house to earn money, and while half of the students had left because of the bad reputation of a kendo school where an assistant master, a woman for more details, was the only person to give the lessons had been bad enough, but _this… _Who would have told her that she would lose the other half of her students to a filthy killer who usurped the name of her school to commit his crimes?

_Battousai…_she thought, in smouldering anger. _I may be only one woman, and an assistant master, and you might be a legend from the Bakumatsu, but I swear I'll hunt you down! There's nothing so base and cowardly as killing people and deflecting the blame to a dojo that teaches a technique which does not kill, and that was created with the sole purpose of…_

The young woman let a long breath escape her lips, and put her kendo gear on the ground to lean on the wall. It was not the moment to get sentimental; a threat was menacing her dojo and she needed to be in full form to clean its reputation. It was not the moment, but…

Oh, why did Fate have to prosecute her father that way? Idealist to the core, he had been the first to create a technique whose sole purpose was to defeat an opponent without killing him and protect life, but as he was already seeing it grow and his dream was coming true, he had been forced to fight in the Seinan war and he had got killed. Now, the school he had worked so hard to establish, the Kamiya Kasshin Ryu, was being accused of the most gruesome murders. A tear glistened down his daughter's cheek, and she brushed it away almost hysterically. It wouldn't be like that. Oh, no, she wouldn't allow it.

_She would die if it was necessary, to protect her father's dream_.

Feeling considerably comforted after making her determination, Kaoru lifted the bag over her shoulders, and walked at last towards the door of her house. It smelled very good, which meant that Tomoe-san had probably made lunch already. Megumi-san would be just about to arrive, and the girl imagined that she would eat quickly as she always did, throw her some sarcastic darts and rush out again to the clinic, where she would stay until night. That suited her perfectly, since she knew that the doctor wouldn't ever approve and probably even allow her night patrols. To be a boarder, in fact, even a paying one, Kaoru found sometimes that she was a little too… overbearing.

"I'm home!" she shouted, sliding the shoji open. As she had imagined, the food-trays were already set on the floor, filled with cooked food and exhaling a dim, delicious-smelling smoke. Next to them, a beautiful and grave woman cocked her head to the side and nodded in welcome.

"Good day, Tomoe-san. Thank you," Kaoru recited, before rushing to her room to get rid of her things. Her boarder nodded again, and watched her leave with a somewhat dazed glance.

Tomoe was the oldest of the women who lived in the house; a sad, dark-haired lady in her thirties with a heartshaking glance in her deep brown eyes. She had come months ago, knocking at the door at night, and looking as nothing short of an eerie figure directly projected from a distant time. Kaoru had soon realised that her voice had been quenched permanently for some unknown reason, but her writing was graceful and perfect, and she used it every day to write in a secret diary that she kept always with her. Since the day she had arrived, she hadn't set a single foot in the street, but instead she stayed around the house, and sometimes sat in the yard feeding the cats which came to rest their heads in her lap. She seemed to live in her own world, and paid little attention to the two younger women's bickering or jokes. To Kaoru it gave the impression that she just… existed.

_There's such pain in her eyes, always… _Megumi, who for some reason spent a lot of time with the woman, had told her once in an absent whisper. Kaoru had been thinking about this for a while, though finally she had given up, aware that the woman's secrets were sealed too deeply for anybody to discover or maybe understand. Still, she felt a strange affinity towards her, and an irrational urge to do for her whatever she could. For example, she had never told her that the money she gave her was by far less than enough, since, if she had done so, she knew that the proud woman would have just packed her things and left to starve in the streets. She was obviously a samurai woman, and her manners were as old-fashioned as Kaoru's mother had been. Sometimes, in fact, the girl couldn't help but think about her mother when Tomoe was around, both of them women who lived and died hiding their sorrow…

_Ouch._

"I'm home!" she heard another vibrant voice coming from the doorstep. That was the doctor, she muttered to herself with a grumble as she splashed her face a couple of times. She definitely wasn't in the mood for hearing her say that she was sweaty now.

"Welcome home, Megumi-san," she said, appearing at the doorstep of the dining room. The newcomer looked a bit worn out, but she smiled airily in return and sat down in front of her dinner tray.

"Already here?" she chuckled. Tomoe poured some water in the clay cups, and both she and Kaoru took their places as well. The earlier part of the meal took place in silence, until Kaoru felt in the duty of breaking it the first

"I'm so envious, Tomoe-san…" she commented, devouring the last remains of the first course. "How can you cook so well?"

"Skill, practice and _patience,_" Megumi answered for her. Tomoe nodded and curved the edge of her lips almost imperceptibly.

"Well, excuse me for not having the time!" the younger girl exclaimed, a bit outraged. "I have things to do, like taking care of a dojo!"

"This is no excuse," Megumi grinned in her usual provocative fashion. For a moment, Kaoru felt tempted to imagine fox ears popping from her head. "Even if I'm working all day, I always had time left to learn how to prepare good _and edible_ dishes!"

Kaoru growled in warning, as the chopstick broke with a sharp twang under her fingers. Fortunately enough, before the thing could go further the three women could hear the distinct sound of a knock at the door, and the owner of the house jumped to her feet.

_Could it be…that her students had decided to help her that night, after all?_

"Coming!" she sang, rushing again towards the shoji and sliding it open. To her surprise, though, her eyes did not meet anyone at the other side as she had expected. There was a folded paper in front of the entrance, but whoever had knocked had vanished as if by magical arts.

_Uh?_

Kaoru knelt down to pick it up and felt a shiver shaking her body while she tried to guess who could have done that and why. People who didn't want to be seen didn't leave good news at one's doorstep, this was rather obvious.

"What's the matter? Was it a prank?" Megumi asked from inside. When Kaoru did not answer she began to feel worried, and got up to walk towards her.

"It's… it's nothing." Trying to suppress her sudden pallor, the girl folded the note abruptly and fumbled to hide it somewhere. "A prank."

"You are unable to tell even a simple lie," the doctor grumbled. The girl blushed.

"All right," she sighed, handing the paper to her with a guilty expression. As Megumi took it, a mask of angry determination began to build over the girl's features. "I'm sorry… I was planning to finish this as soon as possible."

The older woman was now giving proof of a definitely uncommon uneasiness. Without losing any time, she let her eyes scan across the written text, and her face was drained of all colour when she recognised the characters which composed it.

_"We will tear the Kamiya dojo to pieces."_

(To be continued)

Megumi´s incident with Kenshin has been set two years earlier.

****


	2. Chapter Two

**Note: **Oh, I´m very glad I got response. I wasn´t quite sure about this idea. Thanks, people! I was all teary-eyed when you considered it to be a good idea. I thought it was rather crazy, actually. ;)

Now, about the comments of a reviewer about spelling, the English I´ve been taught is English from Britain, considered the standard to be taught in the great majority of countries where English isn´t the mother tongue. So you won´t find "color", but "colour", and not "apologize", but "apologise".

Nothing else. Thank you, everyone!

****

**Doll House******

**Chapter II******

****

****

**_Takani Megumi_****__**

******__**

The woman walked the streets at a quick, brisk pace. The sun had already set, and in the increasingly empty streets she felt less sure than ever. Maybe it was only her imagination, but she was almost certain that someone was spying on her… a presence that desired to remain unknown.

_Again…___

She couldn't put the other two women in danger for any longer. More than danger, in fact: what she had done to Kaoru was terrible, though back then she hadn't had the slightest idea that the girl's bad luck could be even remotely connected with her. Now, she wasn't quite sure either, but the suspicions were growing and meanwhile had adopted an enormous weight in her mind.

How could he… have…? No, she corrected herself, how could _she _have held hopes of living among the rest of the people, in peace and free of fear! She had thought that for doing so she only had to get rid of her inner demons, and she knew that she had the strength to do so, but by thinking this she had disregarded the external forces that could join to make her fall into the trap again. When she had read that message and thought she recognised…

_Gather yourself, Megumi,_ she breathed. This was not sure at all. It could be nothing more than her twisted imagination, since the evidence was by no means conclusive. Now that she didn't have that piece of paper in front of her eyes anymore, she had space to hope that it had been an error. And, if it was so…

If it was so, what?, she answered herself bitterly almost at the same time. Could she risk the lives of innocents like this, even if it could be an error? She had stayed alive to atone and help people, not to put them in danger or bring ruin to their lives. And, if her suppositions were correct, it was _her _that they wanted, no one else.

The woman slid her right hand inside her obi for an imperceptible moment, and felt the familiar touch of her dagger. The cold sensation of the steel on her skin reassured her and gave her strength, and she curved her lips in a fierce smile. They _wouldn't_ have her. Oh, no, not in this life or the next. She wasn't the owner of her own destiny anymore; it was in the hands of all the people she had to help. They could force her to live alone, hiding and continuously hunting for any signal of noises and glimpses of her stalkers, but they wouldn't have her.

Minutes later, Megumi stepped inside the shadows of the dojo yard, shivering a bit at the cold air of the night. There was a lamp already lighting the porch with a weak glow, which cast reflections of the silhouette of a woman who sat there quietly, feeding a herd of cats. As always, she thought with an inner chuckle, Tomoe-san was surrounding herself with her friends.

"Good evening," she greeted her in a low voice, as she neared her with care not to step over any of the fierce little animals. Tomoe had been smiling, but as soon as she heard her come she immediately sobered up and nodded. A cat had crept on her lap, and she caressed its back with an inquiring expression.

_Well, well…She can live in her own world and be incisively observant at the same time.___

"What's the matter with me?" Megumi asked. Oh, she felt so tired… "I've had a lot of work, that's all. This and…" She interrupted the sentence for a long while, wondering whether she should say it or not. Tomoe-san already knew some things about her that nobody else knew, as it was in her nature to be a dark and unfathomable pool of secrets. Her sad brown eyes swallowed all sorrows and complaints, and never offered anything in return.

That thought was suddenly too dangerously comforting for Megumi.

"Meeeow!" A cat's yell was followed by a hiss and a sharp intake of breath. The doctor turned her head at once, and arrived just in time to wriggle a mischievous kitten out of Tomoe's thick black tresses.

"Bad, bad cat. Get out! Out, now!" she cried, pulling it away. Unfortunately, the little fiend had grabbed the mass of hair as if it was a board of salvation, and it did not allow itself to be torn away without getting some of it with him and biting the doctor in the hand.

"Cats are like that. Ungrateful creatures!" Megumi hissed, as she checked Tomoe's hair. The older woman looked pained, but her composure was admirable, and there wasn't even a tear in her eyes. "If you give them too much confidence… Oh, wait a minute."

Sliding the shoji open, she stepped inside her room briefly to get her comb. Kaoru's room was shut, so she supposed that the girl was already sleeping. Well, that was good… this would allow her to tell her tomorrow. She needed time, after all.

When she stepped out again, the doctor found Tomoe petting the cats again in the exactly same position, as if nothing had happened. This made her suppress a sigh, while she knelt at her side.

"Tomoe-san, you're _impossible_…" she growled in an undertone, loosing her tresses in order to comb them. "Well, where were we? Oh, yes… I was going to tell you that I'm probably leaving tomorrow."

The other woman stiffened, and Megumi was able to perceive the sudden tension in her muscles. It was fine, she had expected such a reaction. Now, which lie would she tell her?

"I've been called from another city," she said at last. "They are building a new clinic there, and somebody told them about me. I liked the project very much, so I've decided I'm going to accept."

To her great surprise, Tomoe shook her head.

"What?" she exclaimed, letting the comb rest on the floor of the porch with a somewhat crispated hand. The older woman turned back to face her with her loose hair dangling down her back, and Megumi's eyes widened as she admired her beauty by the light of the candle. Then, she made a gesture with her fingers pointing her eyes, letting them flow down her cheeks as if they were tears.

"You would be sad?" the doctor ventured. "No… you point at me… _I _would be sad? It isn't that either?"

Tomoe pointed intensively at the place where they were, and the light of comprehension began to dawn in Megumi's mind. "Ah… you mean that I am sad _now_?" Puzzled, her first reaction was to try to deny it vehemently, but _something_ in the other woman's face prevented her from doing so. How could she know? It was not that she was vain, but she was positive that she put up an admirable acting in front of others after years of experience and endurance.

"You are right," she sighed at last, saving whatever composure she had left. "But I have no other option. I'm afraid that…" She stopped herself again, refusing to pronounce the words. It was so shameful…

Tomoe gave her an encouraging look.

_Darn…___

"I'm afraid that I'm not going to improve my skills at all if I just stay helping around in a small clinic," she said, getting up with determination. After all, Tomoe-san didn't tell her about her problems either, so why should she? "Now, please, come and leave the cats to wrestle on their own. It would be good for both of us if we had a warm dinner."

As she got inside the dark house, however, Megumi did not hear the sound of anybody following her steps.

* * *

_You're not happy…___

"Why, of course I'm not!"

Once she was inside her bed at last, about an hour later, and in spite of the weariness that she felt after a hard day of work, the young doctor could not help but toss and turn around, submerged in her own musings. Tomoe-san had told her that she was sad… and, to tell the truth, she had been right. Though, more than sad, she would describe it as some nagging feeling of nostalgia, and a sharp suffocation. The girl was innocent, clumsy and impulsive, and she made ample fun of these "qualities", but in spite of all the times that she picked on her, she was aware that Kaoru had managed to turn herself into a constant reference that filled her life and gave it a part of its meaning. She amused her, and when she returned from work she was already wondering how she would surprise her this time and make her forget how tired she was. Even more; her dreams and hopes, the dreams and hopes of a normal girl who was living her life, rubbed off a bit on her and sometimes allowed her to feel like one more in her family for a while.

And Tomoe-san… it was too complicated to explain what she felt towards her, but sometimes it felt surprisingly good to sit beside her. She didn't ask questions - well, most of the times, and she was still astonished at her behaviour of that night -, didn't accuse her, didn't judge her, but rather had _that _look in her eyes that never failed to tell her that, in some way, she understood her and knew what it was to feel haunted by a terrible past that would never let go completely. In fact, those eyes… they reminded her a bit too much of _him, _sometimes.

_Maybe that was why it felt so good to sit beside her.___

Now, the suffocation that she was experiencing so intensely was the almost unbearable feeling of knowing that she would always be tracked, no matter what she did. Once she had already managed to convince herself that they had definitely vanished from her life, maybe because of a suspicion, or maybe because of a true evidence, everything was falling apart once more. She was condemned to flee, to leave the people that she had come to like, to fight for her life and for her soul with nails and teeth forever.

_And with **this,** _she reminded herself, getting a hand under her pillow and touching her dagger. _With this too.___

Minutes later, with a single tear slowly drying on her left cheek and her hand still clutching the handle of her small weapon, the doctor fell at last into a deep sleep. Unbeknownst to her, that was the moment that a slender figure chose to slide the shoji open, and tiptoe in complete silence towards the inner rooms.

* * *

**_Kamiya Kaoru_****__**

******__**

The girl let the bag fall to the dojo floor with a thump, and rubbed her sleepy eyes before walking towards the corner where she kept the swords. There was nobody there yet, and the silent emptiness reverberated heavily against her ears.

Last night had been a total failure that she didn't really want to remember. She had spent hours wandering around the city at night, even at the most awful places that she hadn't ever dared to visit before. As long as she was fuelled by the determination she had made nothing had mattered to her anymore, as if her own body didn't belong to her mind.

_We will tear the Kamiya dojo to pieces…___

How dare he? How dare he put her students in danger, her boarders, and the Kamiya Kasshin style? What did he pretend to get from this, that murderer? The only thing that came to her mind was that his blood-lusting mind felt challenged by the only non-killing technique that existed in Tokyo, and wanted to put an end to even the possibility of the dream. And this, of course, helped a lot to irritate her further.

In vain. All had been in vain, she despaired once more, pulling the sword off from the racket and submerging in a furious session of practice. She had met other people who had put her mission and herself in danger, but the infamous hitokiri hadn't risked an appearance. And, she knew it very well, if she didn't catch him soon, everything, meaning _everything _in truth, around her was going to crumble. The dojo would lose its last students who gave it the last breaths of life. Her house would lose its boarders, which would leave her completely alone and devoid of any friend. And with them, all the money would leave, and the dojo, together with everything her father had fought so hard to achieve, would be forsaken.

She had rarely felt so desperate _ever.___

"Why did you have to leave?"she muttered, between clenched teeth and trying to keep her breath even. "Nothing of this would have happened. They wouldn't have dared… not even Battousai…"

_Crybaby,_ she scolded herself. That's what Megumi-san would call her, and she was right even if Kaoru doubted that the doctor understood the exact scope of what she was talking about. She had to be brave, fight for what she cherished most since that was her duty. She was too old already, and the situation was too dire as to wallow in self-pity.

"Excuse me, Kaoru-sensei…"

"At last!" The young woman snapped out of her practice session, and wiped the sweat on her forehead with hidden glee. Her two students were standing on the door, and she beckoned them in with a severe gesture. "Do you have any excuse for coming so late?"__

"Kaoru-sensei…" The boys didn't make a move to get in, nor did they discard their shoes on the door. A vague feeling of alarm started nagging at the back of Kaoru's mind.

"What's the matter?" she cried in exasperation, trying to quench the hesitation in her voice. "Come in, I say! We're too late already!"

_They wouldn't… would they?___

"My older brother heard in a tavern yesterday that a gang is going to attack this dojo. One of theirs was killed by that Battousai, and they…"

"…want revenge." his companion finished for him.

"Yes." the first to speak nodded gravely. "And we're leaving. Our families don't want us to be here anymore."

Those words struck Kaoru with the might of a hammer crashing down on her head. For a long while, she was paralysed, and all wordsfailed to come to her mouth. She didn't even have the strength or the drive to protest once more, and shout to them that Battousai never had belonged to her dojo.

_Did that matter anymore?___

"You… are leaving?" she muttered at last. _Oh no, her lip was trembling! She couldn't… _"For good?"

The boys' faces softened, and she thought she could spot guilt and pity in both of them. As if on common accord, they bowed deeply.

"We're sorry. Please, forgive us. We know you're innocent, but…"

"If it only depended on me, I would have never left," the other assured her, but without daring to look at her in the eye. For once, Kaoru was glad of this, since she would have hated that they had been able to see her pathetic state. "Goodbye, Kaoru-sensei."

She was not sure whether she had been able to mutter something as an answer to this. Her eyes were fixed on the silhouettes that walked down the yard until they disappeared behind the gates of the compound, and she stayed in that position for long, unable to act or to think anything. It was when she found herself wholly alone in her empty dojo when she felt at last an emotion breaking through her dazed mind, and she started to sob, falling to her knees on the wooden floor.

* * *

"I'm… home," she muttered. She didn't even bother to wait for an answer before she rushed to her room to leave her things there, though she could observe that Megumi had returned earlier than usual and was looking at her in surprise. When at last she could gather herself enough as to emerge again, her eyes met two worried pairs of glances, one of them laced with a tinge of…

_…guilt?___

"You come earlier at each passing day," Megumi commented. Kaoru shrugged her shoulders as her answer, but in the last moment she turned back towards the doctor and frowned.

"You too," she observed. "You're never here so early. Is the clinic closed?"

"Well… no." To her great surprise, Megumi hesitated for a while, as if she was nervous. Her agitation was perceptible for a fleeting moment, until she regained her usual composure and gave her a matter-of-fact look. "I'm moving out tomorrow morning."

Kaoru's face paled visibly.

"What?"

"Yes," Megumi turned back, turning her back to her with the pretext of cutting some vegetables. "I've received a letter from…"

But the girl raised her hand and made a decided, somewhat curt gesture of dismissal.

"There's no need of giving me reasons. Really. I…. understand."

With puzzled eyes, both Megumi and Tomoe watched the young woman leave in silence, and head towards the cherished darkness of her room at a tense pace.

* * *

**_Himura Tomoe_****__**

******__**

_My hand is trembling as I write today's lines. It's the first time in months, maybe in years… I would be able to say it accurately if I hadn't let go of the notion of time. Still, if there's something I can say in truth it is that I feel as if I hadn't undergone anything similar for a long while. Peace was all my life was filled with, without remembering or having nightmares like those that I used to have before. I had been quietly observing the people who live in this house, their bickering and their daily problems, without interfering in them. Mute for so many years, I had accepted my punishment and grown to love it, to depend on it, so much that I don't remember anymore the disagreeable sensation of having to pronounce words and lies in front of people, of seeing them believe me, too coward to say the truth, and of being **asked**, wrung out shreds of shameful information. I had become what I had wanted so eagerly to be for the last thirteen years; a silent presence with no past, no future and a hazy present, a friendly hand who helps living people by looking after the things that they leave behind in their busy lives, and whom they never, ever, would ever dream of asking a single question.___

_And then, above all, I had ceased thinking. After being through a long hell of years I had finally erased the broken images of Kiyosato and of Kenshin from my mind, facing each other, hurting each other with their bloodstained swords. To be at peace with both, I thought, the only thing I could do was forget them both. The anguished eyes, the anguished voices were no longer there, whispering my name…___

**_Tomoe… why?_****__**

_It might be because I have been hearing his name, no, his title, for weeks now in this house. The hitokiri Batotusai, the legendary manslayer of the Bakumatsu, is wandering the streets of Tokyo killing people and claiming he has studied in the Kamiya Kasshin dojo. I know it's not him; it must be someone using his name. What interest would he have in continuing to kill idly so many years after the peace, tarnishing the reputation of a little dojo with no great fame or pretensions? Hadn't he promised…?___

_…Promised to **me…**_**__**

_Maybe I wrecked the only opportunity he might ever have had of finding peace, and of cutting the vicious circle of murders and blood that had been his life until then. Maybe, who knows? with my betrayal and my departure, he lost all hope of ever being accepted anywhere by anyone, and lost forever what had remained of his soul. Maybe the kindness he was starting to show died trampled under my feet that snowy morning. ___

**_Maybe I'm guilty of all this…_****__**

_But no, what am I saying? It's not him. I **know **it's not him. His name is so legendary that it fills anyone's heart with terror, and that's why any ruffian knows he can earn much by adopting it. It **can't** be him.___

_Either way, what really matters is that, because of this, the images have returned to my mind of late. Last night, as I was lying in my bed, I saw his face with my own eyes. He was lying on his futon, unconscious and full of bandages, and as I got near he started to toss and groan. He asked me why…and I got up at once to find myself wriggling in an empty bed with my eyes full of silent tears. Again. Yet again. ___

_Now, and as I am standing here, I'm feeling again the agony, intensified by the longing of years. Did I remember to close the door when I left? Did the villagers find him quickly? Did he ask for me, try to find me, and did he hate me when he woke up? Did he return to fighting because he wanted to forget me, or because he did not care anymore? What did he do once the Bakumatsu was over? Did he fulfil the vow made to a traitor?___

**_Is he alive now?_****__**

_I feel as if I was being torn in two painfully, like I was on those winter days I have always tried so hard to forget. The only way to achieve peace for me is to forget everything about him, and to leave as little traces as possible of my footsteps on the frail surface of the world. I want to disappear in the shadows, for if my eyes met his once…I honestly don't know what I would do. I would prefer death a thousand times over than to see his feelings towards me mirrored in those violet - amber?- orbs. But, at the same time, I am still worrying about him. I desperately want to know how he's doing now, and what does he feel. I fret on his account, and see his face at night. Sometimes…I even have shady and shameful recollections of a mutual smile, or a fleeting moment of passion that reverberates in my body and provokes guilty reactions. We were so young back then…___

_I miss him. Wretched, damned and accursed, I miss him so much that it will be a long while until I'm able to smother and drown this image into the mass of frozen, forgotten dreams. And meanwhile, while I'm not strong enough as to do so, my small world will stay torn in two, as if pierced by that sword that almost killed me in that morning of sordid carnage.___

_Oh, I wish so much that it had killed me in truth…___

******__**

* * *

**_Kamiya Kaoru_****__**

******__**

Kaoru tightened her grip on the hilt of her wooden sword, and repressed a growl of frustration. After spending hours patrolling the quarters of worst reputation, hearing jeers, lewd invitations, even fighting with one or two people and being thrown out or leaving on her own feet at least five different taverns, she was none the wiser about the whereabouts or the looks of the Battousai. It was just like the previous night; all her efforts had gone to waste, and tomorrow she was sure she would spend all day half broken with exhaustion and unable to hide it. Megumi-san would say…

_Nothing. _She would say nothing, Kaoru remembered, feeling a pang shake her heart. She was going to leave, because her landlady was not able to keep her own house safe anymore. Tomoe-san would stay simply because she couldn't go anywhere else, and if harm came to her it would be Kaoru's fault too. Because she was darn unable to do anything _right_.

The girl stopped absently in front of the next tavern. Behind her, a dizzy voice was offering her a drink, and when she saw the pitiful state of the drunkard who was addressing her she left aside her "fighting mode" for some seconds and did a great effort overcoming her repugnance to help him lie in a not too uncomfortable place, and wind the sake jar from his already lax fingers. Hearing some soft and confused curses, she sniffed the bottle, and threw it as far as she could with a grimace.

_Argh, that **wasn't **sake.___

With a dismissive shake of her head, Kaoru walked towards the door of the infect place, and covered her nose to stand the stench of alcohol, smoke and vomit. Having learned from previous experiences, she didn't get inside anymore, just took a long peep from the entrance and checked that there wasn't any sword propped against the walls or in anyone's possession. She did not even bother to go in and "try to get information"; she had to repress a furious blush whenever she remembered how disastrously those attempts had ended in the other places.

_Maybe he hadn't gone out this night either?___

Maybe all he wanted was to drive her mad and self-destruct, she mused while she turned back on her heels and walked away. The drunkard was still muttering something unrecognisable when she walked past him, but he hadn't been able to get up. She was almost tempted to follow his example; for her feet ached and her head was starting to spin in circles. She should have eaten more, but from yesterday's experience she was afraid she would end one day by throwing up.

_Great, Kaoru, great. And now, if you meet him, what will you do?_

A bit worried, the girl crossed another frequented street and peered into a smaller one to continue her exhaustive investigation. Oh, it _couldn't _be true that now she was afraid of not being able to complete her mission because of her darn _state._ What was she doing there in the first place, then? Her technique was superior because it used the adversary's own strength against him, and she had studied it thoroughly before coming here. Even more, fighting for a just cause gave her energy and determination. She just could _not…___

_Uh?___

Kaoru stopped, and let all those thoughts drop from her mind for a moment. In spite of what it had seemed to her at first sight, there was _someone _in that street. It was a short silhouette, too rigid to be a drunkard, and he seemed to her piercing glance to be rearranging a pile of… boxes? that were piled in front of a house.

_A robber?___

Carefully, Kaoru tiptoed a bit closer, hiding in the shadows to get a better glimpse at that mysterious person. He had a bag on his shoulders, which he left now in the middle of a comfortable corner he had been able to make out of the new disposition of the boxes. Oh, just a beggar….

But then, as the girl was about to turn back and continue searching elsewhere, the clouds were parted at last, and the full moon appeared behind the clouds, casting a pale light over the bent body of the man. He was dressed in a hakama, and, hanging from his obi, Kaoru's surprised glance was able to spot the shape of a sheath.

_The sheath of a real sword.___

Her mouth curved into a brief smile of thankfulness towards the silvery orb which had unwittingly helped her in her endeavours. Immediately afterwards, she sobered up, and turned her face into a serious mask of determination while she fell into a stance.

"Hey you! Stop where you are, now!" she yelled. To all appearances taken at unawares, the man turned his head towards her. His hair was red like blood, the girl realised, trying hard not to feel intimidated in front of the impending battle.

"Hmmm?"

His face was the purest expression of innocence, and this made her blood boil again.__

"Don't play the fool with me, _hitokiri Battousai_!"

As she charged forwards she could spot a pair of violet eyes, widening in astonishment at the centre of the hazy blur.

"Oro?"

(To be continued)

* * *


	3. Chapter Three

**

* * *

Notes: **First, thank you very much for all your kind reviews. Second, I´m very sorry for the delay, but I´m currently suffering from a neck problem that doesn´t allow me to be at the computer for extended periods of time, and for a while I haven´t been able to be there at all. But, isn´t it better late than never? ,) 

Now, as for some things in your reviews… **Wistful Eyes, **hehe, I really don´t think Kaoru was so stupid for thinking that Kenshin was the Battousai, was she? But yeah, she was surely very pressured, and I tried to depict that. **Shiguru, **LOL! Well, isn´t Kaoru fighting crime? ;) And I´m a Tomoe and Megumi fan, too. (Who would tell…?) **Lucrecia leVrai, **it was precisely the mindless character bashing what made me write this. I wanted to use the same cliché (that is, putting them all together) with different results. **Aikawarazu Ai, **don´t worry.;) I have to point, though, that in grammars and dictionaries, British English is considered technically correct in all places where English is spoken (if it´s well-written, of course. It´s very possible that I have tripped in many other places, and, sadly, if my beta didn´t point it I will never know. **/**wails**/)**

And to all the others, thank you very much too! ;) (Ooops, so I said it already…)

**Doll House**

**Chapter Three**

****

****

**__**

**_Kamiya Kaoru_**

****

In spite of all her courage and her forwardness, if there was something that Kamiya Kaoru had not expected it was that her strike would hit home in such a successful way. She had expected her opponent to counterattack, or at least to parry, and her mind was already planning a manoeuvre to pin him down when the man was surprisingly knocked away, and fell among the piled up boxes with a stupendous crash.

"Ororororoo…"

Piqued by a vivid curiosity, though without committing the error of lowering her guard, the young girl slowly approached the mess she had made, and studied the complaining heap on top of it. He was a short and scrawny man with strange red hair, far too young to have fought in the Bakumatsu. His clothes were very old and worn, and they looked to Kaoru as if they had been mended a hundred times already.

_Darn…_

"Are you…" The girl's voice lowered, as she started to realise the extent of what she had done. Had she just… attacked an unsuspecting innocent in the middle of the street…? "Are you the hitokiri Battousai?"

The man ceased complaining abruptly, and scratched the back of his head with his hand. His mouth curved into the most perfectly innocent of all harmless grins.

"Me? Oh, no! This unworthy one is just a wandering swordsman, a _rurouni_, that I am," he replied with a cheerful voice. Kaoru felt the heavy weight of dismay settling in her stomach at those words, smothering even her guilt and her wish to apologise. Why, if it hadn't been for that misleading intruder who had made her hold false hopes by carrying an illegal sword…!

"Look at my sword," he continued, unsheathing his weapon and putting it in front of her eyes. The girl's eyes widened when she saw its strange shape. The cutting part of the blade was in the place of the flat one, and vice versa.

"What's this? It's… reversed?"

"This sword does not kill, that it doesn't," the man explained, as if very proud of himself. Kaoru was starting to find his exaggerated politeness infuriating, especially because of the circumstances.

"Swords are forbidden!" she yelled, tossing it back. The man did a very funny dance trying to catch it before it reached the floor, something he did not accomplish until the last possible moment. Genius swordsman, she thought sourly. Legendary indeed! "Carrying one openly is a great imprudence. Especially when that bloodthirsty legendary killer is roaming around! You could have…!"

In that moment, though, and fortunately for the target of her tongue-lashing, a police whistle cut the atmosphere of the night. Kaoru closed her mouth at once, as she felt a ray of hope filling her heart again.

"Now, stay here!" she warned him in a serious tone. "I have things to do!"

When the girl started her mad run towards the place where the noises were coming from, adrenaline rushing through her veins and pumping in her head, she failed to notice that she was being followed.

* * *

Minutes later, Kaoru arrived at last to her destination. Exhausted, she paused briefly in order to regain her breath, and then lifted her head to take a look at the scene that was unfolding in front of her eyes.

Her long research had born fruit this time, or so she thought with an increasing anxiety that mingled with her satisfaction. A police squad was surrounding a gigantic, masked man with a sword, to which they did not seem to dare to get closer in spite of the odds being at their favour.When two of them rushed at last to attack, they were immediately projected backwards, wounded by a powerful strike.

_This is him, Kaoru. This is the bastard. He's the one who…_

Still, and to the girl's great frustration, now that she was there in front of him she felt paralysed with fear, unable to approach him. He _could really kill her. _This was no joke or practice session, but her first real fight with a legendary killer who wielded a true sword. Would she throw away her life trying to.?

_Wouldn't her father have given his life as well?_

Kaoru advanced one step, then two, in an almost unreal slow motion. She had to do it. She recalled her empty dojo, the things that were said about it, her boarders… the honour of her school….

_…Before it was too late…_

"Pathetic weaklings!" the monster laughed. "See what Battousai's Kamiya Kasshin Ryu can do!"

With a yell of fury, Kaoru got in position, and charged against the murderer while the policemen backed down in surprise.

"Prepare yourself, Battousai!"

In spite of his bulk, her opponent did a good job dodging her attack. Surprised, but without allowing her surprise to affect her capacity of reaction, Kaoru stayed firmly planted in her ground and turned back to face him again. This wasn't like the fights she had taken part in for all those years; instead of being careful of doing all the moves as well as possible she was robbed of all capacity of even thinking what she was doing. Now, the sole force driving her forwards was instinct.

"A girl challenges me?" The killer laughed from behind his mask.

"I'm Kamiya Kaoru," she declared proudly, withstanding his glance. "Assistant master of the _Kamiya Kasshin_ style."

"Really?" Battousai got into an unknown stance, and shrugged his shoulders. Not only was he not using her style, but he also was left-handed, Kaoru noticed as she looked at him more closely. "Then you might want to die!"

Both gave the leap at the same time on this occasion, causing their swords to meet in the air with a sickening thud. Then, Kaoru felt a strange sensation, as if something was giving way under her arm, and felt herself falling to the floor. With a great effort, she managed to land in a decent position and struggled to face him again, but what she saw then robbed her of her breath. Her sword…

_Broken._

"The stupid girl challenged the hitokiri Battousai with a wooden sword!" the giant laughed. "Now you will pay dearly for your imprudence!"

Afterwards, Kaoru would admit to herself that the only reason why she didn't show her fear was that she was too paralysed as to even move. The bloody sword glittered in the moonlight in her direction, and she only could stay there, clutching a broken stick as if it was her only board of salvation. Salvation…

_What could save her now?_

For the first moment since she had started that fight, the girl found herself wishing desperately to be back in her warm home, even without students. Could she have moved on, sold the dojo, and then started a new Kamiya Kasshin dojo in another town? Could she have…?

_Too late. _

Kaoru breathed heavily, trying desperately to find a way out of her imminent death. Dodging to one side, she managed to avoid part of the strike, but her shoulder was wounded and she gave a hiss of pain. Next time…

In the middle of a blur, the girl lunged forwards. She was already seeing everything black around her when, all of a sudden, she felt two arms encircling her body and lifting it. The air rushed in her ears as if she had just been moved at an inhuman speed, causing her broken sword to fall from her hand.

She didn't even hear it fall.

"Uh?"

Little by little, she tried to open her eyes. The first thing that they were able to meet was a blur of red hair, but, as she focused them somewhat better, she realised that she was in the arms of a man who looked only too familiar to her. What wouldn't have been her surprise when she recognised him as the wandering swordsman she had attacked earlier by mistake! "What are you doing here?" Her voice became frantic. "He will kill you! Battousai will kill you!"

"Who has given you the permission to interfere?" Battousai towered upon them, furious. The red haired swordsman turned his face towards him, and held his glance for a long instant of deep silence.

"Bah." Finally, the visible part of the monster's face creased in disdain, and he took his eyes away. "I am Battousai. The hitokiri Battousai of the Kamiya Kashin school!"

Before Kaoru could do anything to prevent it, the killer started a mad run, shoving aside the policemen who obstructed his way. A nagging feeling in her head told her she had to get up, to run behind him… but she was wounded and still affected by her fight, and two arms were holding her with a surprising strength.

…It was that second circumstance which caused her ire to come back in a burning rush.

"Let me go!" she yelled, struggling. "This impostor is tarnishing the reputation of my father's school by killing people in its name! I have to stop him!"

"It was very imprudent of you to attack that man with a wooden sword, that it was," the red haired man said, with the same goofy smile he had gifted her with only some minutes before. "Besides, he's stronger than you."

"What?" The girl's furious struggles increased, but his only reaction was to sling her over his hip and walk away. Kaoru kicked and protested indignantly for a long while, to no avail.

"May this unworthy one escort you where you live?" he said a while later, when they were already at some distance from the place. The girl furrowed her brow.

"Not if you don't put me down," she growled. To her immense relief, the man obeyed her request and began to clutch his hip with a pained expression.

"I think I've hurt myself there. Ouch," he complained, causing Kaoru to shake her head in shocked exasperation. "Must be a contraction…"

"You're impossible!" she sighed. "And now, you'd better tell me why you did interfere in my fight. See, you even… got wounded," she added, lowering her voice as she noticed a bleeding slash in the man's left cheek.

"Well…" The wanderer followed her, rubbing his head. "I already had that wound, that I did. And the reason why I came… I thought you needed my help, that's all. You had lost your sword, and you were wounded. And that murderer is a dangerous man, that he is."

"Battousai has been killing people in the name of my dojo for about a month now," she explained in a bitter tone. "There, this way. I decided that the only thing I could do was to defeat him, because my students have all left and my father's dojo is empty. He worked too hard to create this technique, and now that he's dead… Well, I shouldn't be telling all this to a stranger!" Now, it was the girl's turn to look awkward. That man radiated such kindness and comical harmlessness that she had immediately started to trust him before she had even had time to notice. "They're my problems, after all..."

The wanderer didn't answer anything to this. He seemed to be lost into his own set of musings, though after a while he seemed to snap out of his oblivious state, and turned towards her again.

"Did that Battousai really study in your dojo?" he asked, in an obviously very wrong move. Before he ever was able to gather how, Kaoru was on top of him, yelling into his ear.

"Of course not! He's, he's… he's an impostor! My father's style is a style that protects life above all things. Swords are for protecting, not for killing! This killer is trampling over every single ideal that we always cherished!"

"Ah…" For the first time, the girl was able to spot some kind of deep emotion crossing the man's face. "I see… But... are you sure that he's Battousai as well? If he lied in one thing, why wouldn't he lie in the other?"

"Uh? Well…I suppose I can't know." Kaoru looked to the floor for a while, as if pondering something that hadn't ever occurred to her before. Her wound hurt, so she pressed her training gi against it in an effort to palliate the pangs. "But what does it matter? Between a killing sword and a sword that protect lives, there's a crucial difference. But between a bloodthirsty killer and another bloodthirsty killer, what do I care? I suppose they deserve each other."

A sudden, strange heaviness fell over the man's soft features, mitigated to a certain extent by his ever present smile.

"You're right. This unworthy one simply wondered whether there could be yakuza involved, that's all."

Kaoru felt a commotion inside her at that unexpected reaction. If someone had asked her, she would have had no idea about where did it come from, but she suddenly had the sensation that her companion had lost his youthful appearance for a brief second. Strange… she had barely made the acquaintance of that man, and his attitudes were already affecting her in a mysterious way.

"Oh, and thank you," she muttered, in a much gentler tone. "For… saving my life, I mean."

The red-haired swordsman stopped for a moment in his tracks, and bowed to her in serious silence.

* * *

**_Takani Megumi_**

****

The doctor shivered, willing herself once more to sit down and cross her arms over the table. She was aware that this did not become her reputation as an unfeeling woman without fears, but sometimes, at certain circumstances, she was afraid of the dark. It brought her terrible remembrances of unseen eyes which spied and tracked her every movement, and of the fear of the terrible consequences if she made a gesture in the wrong direction. Even up to that day, this made her smother her emotions behind a sculptured smile that she had long ago created as a substitute for her tears.

Where had that stupid girl gone? She had left without telling them anything, no, without even _wanting_ them to know that she had gone away. Only a day ago, she had said some mysterious words that Megumi hadn't even heard correctly at the time, but that now she remembered to be "I was planning to finish this as soon as possible" with exasperating clarity. And even if her only wish was to get hold of that young ardent fool and yell to her until she burst, she could not help feeling somewhat guilty for it. She had been condemned to a guilty silence, and now, if this silence caused a person to be harmed for her sake…

_Foolish, foolish girl. When she returns…_

Megumi started playing with the fabric of her yukata, her sober substitute for pacing in circles across the room since years ago. She should have left already. They were at her heels. They always got what they wanted…

**_Almost _**_always, _a voice corrected her inside her mind. She needed to have hope. He had showed to her that the tyranny could be overcome, hadn't he?

"Oh, yes, but _where_ is he now?" she grumbled to herself, shaking her head. Alone, she could only rely on herself, and there was only so much she could do. In fact, she hadn't even been able to prevent that girl from exposing herself to the greatest dangers…

As the woman was lost into those disheartened musings, a noise was heard coming from outside. Her heart started to beat quickly, and she tightened her hold on her dagger. Who…?

The noises drew closer, and Megumi tiptoed now towards the side of the closed shoji. Thery were the footsteps of more than one person coming towards where she was, and Kaoru-san, she knew it very well, had got into her own messes _alone_. But, if they thought that they could catch unawares, they were going to have a surprise. They wouldn't catch Takani Megumi unawares again, never ever.

_One of them has stopped, _she noticed after a while. A bead of sweat rolled down her forehead, soon followed by another, but she did not leave her position or even dared to breathe. Maybe they could sense ki?

_Do not even think that!_

One of the intruders laid a hand on the shoji outside, and the doctor watched, almost in fascination, how it was slowly slid open. _That_ was the moment of pure action, without any doubts or thoughts. She wasn't afraid of death, but if there was something that she knew for sure, it was that they weren't leaving _with _her.

_Now!_

The woman raised her weapon, and her hands were immediately caught in a vice-like grip. Dismayed, she tried to struggle, but she soon found it was to no avail. The man pried the dagger away from her fingers, and it fell to the floor at their feet with a loud clatter.

"Who…?"

"What a surprise!" an unmistakeably familiar voice exclaimed next to her ear. "This unworthy one did not imagine he would meet you here at all… Megumi-dono."

* * *

"What?" Kaoru's voice stormed through the dojo. "You know each other?"

The corners of Megumi's mouth twitched. She rolled the bandage some more times around the girl's arm, and then made a strong knot that made Kaoru hiss mildly.

"Don't change the topic! What did you do patrolling the streets at night _with a sword_? And alone! How could you ever think of doing such a stupidity?"

The girl sent an uncertain glance towards the place where the red-haired man was standing. He seemed to be immersed in a detailed exploration of the dojo plaques, to all effects blissfully ignorant of the storm that was raging around him.

"I…" she started. Little by little, she seemed to regain her confidence. "It's not a stupidity, Megumi-san. I went to find the hitokiri Battousai and stop him… to protect my father's school and the rest of things that were threatened by him."

"What?" Confused, the doctor threw a furtive look in the newcomer's direction, only to check that the man hadn't even budged. Did she know…?

_What was really going on?_

"And... have you stopped him?" she asked, trying to keep a cool tone that hid the fact that she was gradually getting lost. But Kaoru's cheeks reddened in shame, and she clenched her fist.

"No, I haven't," she confessed. "I fought him, but he cut my sword. It was this wandering swordsman who rescued me, in fact."

Megumi started to collect back all her medical items, regaining her calm as she felt things to be falling in their place once more. Of course, it made sense. _He _wouldn't have allowed that idiot to fall at the hands of an impostor, not while he was alive and breathing _somewhere._

"Oh, really?" she asked in sarcasm. "And now you will say that tomorrow he won't be so lucky again, and that this time your wooden sword is going to break through his katana, right?"

The girl got up, repressing a grimace of pain.

"Don't be so mean to me!" she hissed. "I'm doing my duty, which is protecting my father's reputation. I don't care what you say! He created this sword school to fulfil the dream of swords protecting people instead of killing. He _believed _in this! And now that he was forced to die against his principles as a soldier in the Seinan war, I won't desert him!"

Megumi breathed deeply, willing herself to keep calm. Kaoru's words sounded so suddenly familiar to her ears that she was glad that the red-haired man wasn't looking at her in the face… and this, unlike what would have been only usual, did not bring the slightest sympathy for the girl to her mind.

"Duty? To rush for a sure death is your duty at present? You can't strive to die because you're unable to find a solution for your problems!"

"Kaoru-dono." Both women closed their mouths, and turned towards the man who had given his first signal of life since they had got inside the dojo to tend to the girl's wounds. He was still watching the names written on the wall, but while he spoke he turned around and walked a few steps towards them. "You should stop those night patrols, that you should."

"I can't get you two!" Kaoru was gradually becoming very flustered. "Do you think I do it for pleasure?"

The wandering swordsman intensified his smile.

"You say that your father's sword school protects life. Wouldn't all those ideals be nothing more than a joke if you let yourself be killed for them?"

For a moment, Kaoru looked as if she had received a deep shock, and closed her mouth as she had opened it. Before she even realised what she was doing, Megumi found herself nodding.

"I'm sure that your honoured father would not have wanted his only daughter to die to protect any sword school, that I am," the man continued after a brief pause, heading towards the open door. "Excuse me."

Little by little, Kaoru started to regain her capacity of speech.

"You're just a vagabond. You… cannot understand!" she said.

Megumi felt the blood inside her positively boiling at this.

"Stop being so selfish!" she shouted. The girl, who was already gathering herself to leave after the wanderer, turned a surprised face towards her. "He understands far better than you, and I do, too!" With careful and studied movements, she sat down again and forced herself to regain her calm, a bit ashamed at her outburst. She never… "You….you're not the only person in this world who has problems. I have endured enough as to tell you this: to sacrifice oneself uselessly for your family's honour is cowardice, and it's _not_ what they would have wanted for you. You're supposed to do something for your father as a living person! Who will teach the Kamiya Kasshin Ryu to anyone if you lose your life? Who will remember that it ever existed?"

For some instants that looked like ages, no one lifted their faces from the floor. Kaoru was the one who did it first, minutes later, and gave Megumi a serious glance in which the doctor thought she was able to find a spark of… recognition?

"Something tells me that you know what you're speaking about," she concluded in a strangely flat whisper. "And _he_… I'm sorry. I… I did not know what came over me." She got up, and was about to help the older woman to do the same when she staggered, and was forced to withdraw her hand and lean on the wall. "Ouch… I'm feeling dizzy. Please, do me a favour and entertain him. I want to apologise to him tomorrow."

"Maybe he has left already," the doctor sighed, curving her mouth in a characteristic gesture. Kaoru stopped in mid way again, and frowned.

"How did you two…?"A second later, however, she seemed to think better about it, and shook her head. "Never mind. Forgive my nosiness."

Megumi walked towards the shoji, and leaned on it as she saw the girl's figure disappearing in the night. A tired expression started to take over her features, but she shrugged it away, and lifted her medical bag from the floor.

"Thanks for that," she muttered, before stepping out herself.

* * *

The night was in an eerie state of quiet when Megumi wrapped herself in her shawl to venture her first steps into its darkness. Everything was calm and silent, as there were no noises coming from the streets, and the gentle light of the moon filtered some rays through the mass of clouds to show her that the yard was empty as well, except for a black cat that was probably searching for Tomoe.

The woman stopped in her tracks, disheartened. Her heart had unconsciously started building more and more hopes since she had seen him standing there, and now there was no turning back; she felt as if she would not be able to bear his disappearance. He was the only one who could help her, maybe the only one whom she trusted to an ample extent in this world.

"Are you. are you here?" she hesitated, feeling a bit stupid at the question. _A vagabond never knows where he's going or for how long…_

Nonsense. Why would he leave so early?

"Do you… want some tea?"

"No, thanks," a voice answered from the middle of the shadows. Megumi could not suppress a startle, and cursed softly to herself even in the middle of her relief. _Just like him…_

The cat who had been scratching its ear conscientiously for a while now turned its back to her and started walking towards the direction of the voice. The woman followed it almost involuntarily, and found the red-haired man propped against the wooden wall that separated them from the street.

"Oh… you're here," she smiled, taking place at his side. He was watching the cat in apparent fascination, though when he felt her presence he snapped out of his reverie for long enough as to greet her with a bow.

"Is that cat yours?" he asked at last. Megumi shook her head with a smile.

"No. Together with many others, it comes and goes frequently around this place, because a woman who lives here is very friendly with them," she explained. Lifting her eyes to the sky, she suppressed a sigh. "She gives them her own food sometimes."

"Really?" The animal's yellow eyes seemed now to be locked into Kenshin's, glowing in the dark as if withstanding a confrontation. "That's curious."

"Do you like cats?"

The red haired man stayed in silence for such a long time that Megumi almost let go of waiting for an answer. Finally, he shrugged his shoulders in a somewhat dismissive gesture.

"Sometimes." His mouth curved into his usual smile that shielded so well the expression of his eyes. "Sometimes I do."

In the weak light of the moon rays, the doctor thought in that moment, his face looked like nothing short from the epitome of innocence. It had always fascinated her, how he could hide so many enigmas within a single expression. His body looked young, so young that it could fool anybody into believing that he wasn't more then fifteen years old, but his violet eyes were burdened by the weight of ages in which they had seen too much to even stay wholly sane. His smile was as warm and contagious as it was empty, and in his pretended foolishness and exaggerated humbleness the woman could almost envision the scope of so many years in constant struggles with himself and a destructive ego. He was constantly playing around with the people who surrounded him, and did it so well that almost no one got to realise how he hid behind those false superposed personalities and states of mind with which he made them believe and see what he wanted in every situation. But, _what_ was really behind those cunningly woven threads of contradictions? He never stayed around someone long enough as to give away this secret, no more than that of the never healing wound in his left cheek.

_And, speaking of wounds…_

"Do you want me to put something on your wound?" she asked. The wanderer turned his head towards her, and the cat, as if driven by a sudden impulse, stood up and fled into the night.

"Thank you very much, Megumi-dono," he smiled. "It's useless. And it has ceased bleeding already, that it has."

_For now, _the doctor finished for him in silence. Suddenly, as they were there, her world seemed to get into motion, and she remembered for the first time that there was something urgent that she needed to tell him.

"I… have something to ask you," she started. "That's why I came here… and it's very important for me."

He lifted his eyebrow.

"About Kaoru-dono's problems?"

"Yes," she nodded, not surprised at his intuition. "It was a fleeting chance that we met each other here, but now I think it must be something related to fate and providence." She shook her head, and let her hair fly loose with a characteristic false smile. Maybe they weren't _that _different, after all… "I'm leaving tomorrow."

"Are you?" A slight frown.

"Yes," she nodded quickly, before she even had the opportunity of starting to feel ashamed. "And I would wish that you protected that little girl until those people stopped harassing her. As she said, they have already robbed her of all her students, and I wouldn't stay at ease unless I knew she is with you."

For a moment, the woman was so sure that he was going to ask her the dreaded question. Fortunately enough, all he did was to smile once more and nod in reassurance.

"I was already planning to solve this problem, that I was," he said. "I can't allow that man to continue spreading terror in my name."

"But…" About to raise an objection, Megumi realised the scope of the implications of her words, and closed her mouth again. Immediately after, however, her mind registered the disheartening truth that there was probably no other way. To make him get things right, something he sorely needed after making such an offer, she was forced to be more sincere than what she had been in years.

_What had she done with her life?_

"Is something the matter, Megumi-dono?" he asked in concern. Maybe he already knew, she tried to think to encourage herself. Maybe he was waiting for her to say it by herself…

"I…" She swallowed a long gulp, and changed her expression again into that standard smirk that never failed to give her such warm confidence. "I think I am the cause of what's happening to Kaoru-san."

No sign of surprise or astonishment greeted her glance.

"Yes?"

"I'm not sure, but… I think they have returned once more,," she continued after a dark pause. "The other day, we received a written threat, and I think that the person who did it was deliberately trying to make me recognise the handwriting."

"Blackmail. And that's why you are leaving?" he asked, after a couple of seconds which he needed to process the information. Megumi was glad now of the relative darkness that could hide and shield the expressions that were crossing her face.

"Yes," she nodded at last. It was becoming really hard to resist the urge of searching for sympathy, even begging abjectly for some morsels of understanding from him. "If I don't leave, they won't cease making her life a hell."

"Even if it might be a trap, to leave you without anyone who could know about your disappearance?"

The woman's body straightened, then fell again into her normal position.

"You know I won't allow myself to fall into their hands anymore," she said. "But I can't rely on innocent people who aren't strong enough as to face the consequences. I have some honour left at this point… or so I prefer to think."

"Do you know the real reason why Kaoru-dono risked her life those nights, trying to face the murderer?"

"The…?" Megumi lifted her face, speechless at the sudden turn of the conversation. _What the…?_

"She… cherished her father very much," she finally offered, after putting her ideas in order for an instant. "Even though he has died, she tries to do whatever she can for him still. That's what I think, at least."

"This unworthy one thought so at first, that I did." The red haired wanderer smiled. "But then, it struck me as if she suddenly… reminded me of someone else, and what you have said now has given me the last clue I needed. It's not so much the technique, the school and her father's memory, as the fact that she feels horror of being alone again."

Megumi stayed motionless for a moment, thunderstruck.

"That murderer was robbing her once more of what was most important in her life, and that's why she did not hesitate to face him," he continued, taking the cue. "Her students had left her, and now you were going to do the same. She isn't a seer or a person with privileged knowledge, and she can't know the real truth behind everything. All she knew was that you were leaving her in the face of danger."

Sudden images… vivid remembrances of the girl turning her back to her when she had told her about her departure flooded Megumi's mind as waves crashing in the sea.

_You don't have to explain. Really. I…understand._

"If she has to think ill of me," she muttered, biting her lip, "so be it. It's not as if she would be the first, and she still has a companion. Besides… she is better off alone than dead, you know."

"She reminds me of you, Megumi-dono."

Silence fell over the courtyard for an endless succession of seconds.

"What?"

"When I met you, you were desperate," the redhaired man explained, his eyes fixed on some distant point behind the shadows. "You were suffering, you felt guilty for what you were forced to do, but above all, you felt lonely. You had lost the hope of seeing your family again, but you couldn't bear the thought of living alone for the rest of your life. That's why you tried to kill yourself." The woman opened her mouth as if to protest, but he asked her to be silent with a polite gesture. "I saw hope in your eyes when I left you, that I did. But now it's gone again, or so it seems to me."

Megumi put her hand over her forehead, trying to avoid being swept away by the force of the truth behind those words. She felt as if she had been exposed, laid open in front of the world, and this brought the unpleasant effect that her walls were crumbling again, her self-contention broken by the knowledge of its own uselessness. It would be so tempting to give way now, forget herself…

But no, _what_ was she thinking? She couldn't let herself be swept away. She couldn't…

"There are many people in this world forced to live alone, isn't it? No one asks us what we do prefer," she replied in a cold, defensive tone. The wanderer did not even blink, only intensified his smile almost imperceptibly until she lowered her voice to a fleeting whisper. "Probably because we don't deserve it."

"You do deserve happiness, Megumi-dono, that you do," he answered. Slyly, of course, he had avoided talking about himself, but that was only to be expected. "You are trying your utmost to do things right."

"And what would you have me do? Is there any other way?" she exclaimed. Her previous defensiveness had vanished now as well, leaving her alone with a true, disquieting vulnerability.

_And a ray of hope…_

"Stay here, Megumi-dono." The red haired man got up, and helped her to do the same. "I promise you I will take care of this."

For a moment, through the blur of the tears that she was fighting back, the doctor thought she was able to see that the bleeding of his wound had stopped again. Slowly, she gathered herself, as she felt a true smile starting to form on her lips for the first time.

_In years._

"Thank you," she whispered. "Once more… thank you."

* * *

**_Himura Tomoe_**

****

The wind was blowing harder and harder, causing the snowflakes to collide with the woman's shaking legs and her wet kimono as she slowly came closer. The yells were filling her ears now, with such an intensity that couldn't be smothered anymore, as much as she covered her ears.

_She shouldn't…_

_What did Kiyosato mean to you?_

_Tomoe…_

She couldn't stand it. She had tried to, but she couldn't stand still like a samurai woman and accept Fate. The man she loved was gravely wounded, deaf and blind, and he was stil struggling to get to his feet once more and defeat his opponent. And he… he…

_He was in this situation because of her._

Tomoe shivered at the cold, imperceptibly trying to curl around herself to protect her body from the rush of the wind. Soon, that would be nothing in comparison with the searing pain that would tear her in two, taking her away from that wretched life that had meant nothing but the ruin and dishonour of many. She was ready to die, if only that could take her away from watching him suffer so much!

Tatsumi-san got up, and took her dagger in his right hand while he waited for his opponent to rise. Among the rain of snowflakes, Tomoe could get a glimpse of his lips curving in an ominous smirk of triumph. As if drawn by an invisible force, her eyes turned instantly to her husband's pitiful figure, and they widened in pity and horror at his situation.

_Poor, blind, bleeding child…_

_…lost child…_

The woman's mouth opened, as a broken, anguished yell broke free from her throat and got lost among the deafening noise of the wind. She had tried. She had tried so hard, but she wasn't able to imagine a life without him, without his hopes, without his dream of a peaceful future. She could not erase from her mind the remembrances of his gentleness.

_There was no forgiveness for what she had done._

In an impulsive rush, her legs got tangled into a mad run towards the battlefield, at the same time as the two warriors started their charge against each other. Her eyes were fixed on the gleam of the dagger, and, with a last sharp and agonic intake of breath, she jumped with all her forces to get it with her hands. A searing pain tore through her shoulder, and she wasn't able to suppress a strangled cry as she hurled her own body towards the opposite side, holding the ninja's right arm in a vice-like grip.

"Tomoe!!!!"

At her side, lying on the frozen ground, the old man's eyes were wide open with the horrible rictus of death.

* * *

The woman woke up with her forehead covered with sweat, her breath coming out in heavy gasps. Those dreams were smothering her mind, again. She couldn't stop herself from obsessing over and over with those things that had happened so long ago, no matter what she did to forget them.

_Maybe that was her punishment…_

Tomoe got up in a brusque motion, and slid open the shoji of her room. While she tiptoed through the dark house, she found herself touching the wound of her shoulder more than once, as if she felt it bleeding again. She was lucky that she could not yell, because at nights, when she couldn't control the sounds coming from her mouth, she would have roused the whole house and frightened its inhabitants with her cries. How she could have kept so much pain to herself at nights throughout the years without breaking was sometimes a mystery even to her.

_Water. Water does me good, _she thought, in an effort to compose herself. In complete silence, she entered the kitchen, and discovered to her surprise that the shoji that led to the porch of the house was wide open. There was light outside, and she thought she could hear voices.

_So late? _she wondered, for a moment feeling something remotely connected to what in a former life she had called curiosity. Soon enough, however, the feeling was over, and she shrugged her shoulders in sad dismissal. It had nothing to do with her. _Nothing_ in the world had anything to do with her. She had to fetch the water and turn back to bed.

Still, after she had managed to fill the cup with the liquid, she heard the tone of the voices increasing, and began to feel the shadows of a presentiment inside herself. It was irrational, an obsession… it had happened to her too many times before now to give it any credit. Sometimes, he was just _everywhere, _she remembered with a sad smile.

Repressing a regretful sigh, now that there was no one to hear it or wonder at its meaning, Tomoe leaned against the shoji and peered outside. The night was calm and beautiful, and she felt an indescribable relief when a slight breeze cooled her forehead. The two people who were talking were starting to approach in search for the lights of the house, and little by little she could clearly recognise….

The cup fell to the floor, crashing with a sickeningly loud sound as the terrified woman fled into the shadows.

_Just another nightmare…_

(to be continued)

* * *


	4. Chapter Four

**Note: **Hi there! Is somebody reading this still?

Whew… I had this on my computer since VERY long ago, so I suddenly diecided to post it. I hadn´t been in the modd to even post for months, but here it is. Enjoy!

**Doll House**

**Chapter Four**

**_Himura Tomoe_**

As soon as the woman slid the shoji of her room close behind her back her legs finally gave way, and she collapsed and fell to her knees with a soft thud. No one had followed her there. She was safe from her demons come alive, back in the shadows, protected, encased…

_Alone…_

Tomoe shivered, pulling herself closer and embracing her legs until her knuckles turned white. She could feel her body throbbing with an almost forgotten ache that alarmed her, and her breath turning difficult under its effects. What on Earth was this? Was her body… crashing down?

_With a great effort, she finally managed to support herself on her bleeding hands, repressing a jolt of pain as the wound in her side throbbed again because of her movements. Leaving a red trail of blood in the snow in her wake, she crawled away from Tatsumi-san, towards the place where Kenshin's ragged breath was coming from._

_She did not dare to lift her face. She could not look at his terrible state once more, and above all at his eyes, at his accusing eyes reminding her of her systematic betrayal of two men. She tried to open her mouth and ask for forgiveness, but the words didn't want to come out._

_Her hands twisted a ball of snow in an agonic reflex, until it turned crimson and started to melt. In an irrational impulse, she wished for an instant that Tatsumi-san was still alive, that he hadn't died and left them alone with each other._

_"I…" she began. "I…"_

**_I am a monster. Finish me now._**

_The snowflakes were falling at a quickening pace, soaking her hair and her kimono as she knelt there, waiting and fearing any sign of acknowledgement from the man that she couldn't bring herself to lay eyes upon. Her ears could register no response, no sound, only a long silence that to her agitated state of mind seemed almost endless. Then, as in a dream, she heard the soft crunch of footsteps treading over the ice in her direction._

_"Kenshin…" she muttered, closing her eyes. Her kimono was already soaked in blood from her wound, but she didn't feel it anymore. "Kenshin…"_

_His steps were faltering, she could notice it from her crouching position. In a blur, she saw something fall to the ground with a soft clatter, which she recognised as her husband's bloody sword. Alarmed, she instinctively got herself to lift her eyes at last…and felt the weight of her raw desperation come back to her in loads. _

_There was no love or hate in his expression, not the slightest hint of forgiveness or anger shining through. His eyes were vacant, empty, **devoid, **and they didn't seem to even see her. All the light she had gradually come to see in them during their months in Otsu was quenched now by an impenetrable darkness, and when his feet gave way his face did not even seem to register any pain or emotion._

_"Kenshin!" she cried, rushing to support his inert body. His clothes were dripping with blood, and she could see the open wounds through the torn fabric of his kimono and hakama. His face had a ghastly, unnatural pallor, and his body felt colder than the snow under her knees. As she gathered him as she could and cradled his head in her lap, she felt her own body racked by long forgotten sensations. An ocean of painful emotions throbbed inside her chest, and finally, with a hoarse, anguished yell of painful liberation, she pulled them to the surface. _

_"Kenshin…I'm…I'm so sorry…!"_

_The wet drops started falling over the young man's closed eyes, as monotonously as the snow that the wind drew around them in menacing circles. The woman held to his unconscious body, protecting it from the blizzard, and, for the first time in so many years, she cried her heart out._

**_Cry…_**

_Cry?_

Tomoe touched her face, and her fingers became immediately wet from the moisture that was rolling down her cheeks. So… that was it? These were tears, and she was crying again, as she had done that day thirteen years ago. Even though she had been sure for long that she didn't have tears left, she was doing it again, she was overpowered by that eerie, noiseless shaking that did not want to stop this time either.

_Already! Leave me, leave me… leave me alone! Please, take pity! I didn't… I didn't want to…_

The wretched woman's hands covered her head feverishly, and she let herself sink onto the couch to smother her sobs once and for all with the bending force of asphyxia.

_Please, let me die…_

* * *

**_Kamiya Kaoru_**

Morning came next day in the shape of a sunray, softly caressing the girl's face as she lay in bed. Tired as she was, she tried at first to bury her head under the covers and free herself from that unwelcome intrusion, but its warm persistence finished by bearing fruit. Suddenly remembering who she was and when and where she was, Kaoru opened her eyes in shock, and pushed the covers away in an impulse. How could she be still sleeping so late, when she had a dojo, a chase, Battousai…!

_Battousai…_

The girl stopped in her tracks, and leaned on the wall with a tiny hint of dizziness overwhelming her mind. She had almost forgotten the events of last night! And she couldn't even blame herself too much for it; all which had happened had been so… confusing that she would think it had been a dream if it hadn't been because her wound was still there, heavily bandaged on her arm.

_I started my chase at night, and then I found that man. I attacked him, believing that he was the Battousai because he was carrying an illegal sword, but he was nothing more than a wanderer. Afterwards, I found the true one… and I fought him! He broke my sword, but that wandering swordsman entered the picture again and rescued me. He brought me back here…and he said…_

Kaoru blushed, as all the memories came back to her mind in a rush. How could she have been so… so stupid, so impulsive, so _childish_? Seen in the reasonable light of the morning, her actions had been those of a real idiot, as Megumi-san had said. True, she had been reasoning in full possession of her faculties when she had decided that she did not mind risking her life, but the way in which she…

_You say that your father's sword school protects life. Wouldn't all those ideals be nothing more than a joke if you let yourself be killed for them?_

Shaking her head as if she wanted to chase those embarrassing recollections from her mind, the girl started dressing at a furious speed. Damn him, she had to acknowledge that he had had a point there. Could he have made the hit a little more direct? It had hurt… that was why she had yelled that…

_Oh, no._

Kaoru put her hand in her forehead, and wiped off a few drops of sweat that were rolling down her skin. She had behaved horribly towards that poor man, and this after he had been unjustly attacked by her, saved her life, and then had been worrying about her safety. How could she have done anything of the sort? She hoped that Megumi had kept him there before she left; she wouldn't be able to live knowing that she had let him go like that!

Sliding the shoji open, the girl walked down the corridor towards the older woman's door. To her surprise, it was closed, and as she put her ear to the door she could hear the distinct sound of a heavy sleeping breath. Now, _what_ was this supposed to mean?

_She probably stayed until late last night, and now she hasn't got up in time, _she thought, wistfully. She was not sure whether she wanted to imagine what the doctor had done alone with that man. They seemed to have a close relationship, and, and… well, she had to admit that he had charm, and…

_Stop thinking like that, Kaoru, _she chided herself. Somehow, she could not help feeling some kind of irrational… _jealousy? _at that train of thoughts, and a deep uneasiness that she had to smother immediately. She had too many problems already to have affair to her silly side.

_If she has missed the train, or the carriage, or whatever, then she'll have to stay here some more time. And there will be time to think of a solution, _she thought, trying to give herself a new hope. _Not to speak about how I will be able to poke fun at her for once and have my revenge,_ she added, as her lips curved into a mischievous smile for the first time since she didn't know how long.

At the kitchen, the girl found that her breakfast was already set, and thanked Tomoe-san in silence for her diligence. The woman usually got up at ungodly hours, and had things always prepared for them even if they woke up very early. While she ate it as quickly as she could, though, her mind could not help wandering again towards that strange man, and the things he had said to her last night.

_He said he was a wandering swordsman… Looking at him, who would think he has any dangerous skills? He could not even stop my strike. But then… he did not hesitate to jump in the middle of my battle with Battousai, and somehow, he was able to stop him. Probably because Battousai was in fear of the arrival of more police and decided it was time to leave, but, still…_

The more that she thought about him, the more she realised the walking enigma that man represented, and the more frustrated she felt about her exchanges with him. She could not grasp him, or rationalise his actions. At one moment he looked stupid and unable to help even himself, and at the next he was giving her a piece of advice that left her thunderstruck. He was small and looked like a weakling, but he went around with an illegal sword. The sword was reversed… Kaoru wondered, not for the first time what could be the meaning of this.

_This sword does not kill, _he had stated, as if very proud of the fact. He had reminded her of her father at that moment, though she had been too busy back then as to acknowledge the exact nature of what she had been feeling. Still, not even her father would have gone that far as to say that _while _defying the sword ban at the same time. What did that man pretend?

_Questions, questions. They're all nothing but questions. And no answers,_ Kaoru thought in frustration, slamming the empty bowl on the table and getting up. If she didn't care for her pride, she wouldn't stop until Megumi-san told her, but, unfortunately, she happened to care very much for that.

"Well, enough already! I have no students, but I should look at things in a positive light and use the opportunity to go shopping instead," she admonished herself. Shielding her eyes from the brilliant onslaught of the sunrays, she slid the shoji of the porch open, and stepped outside. To her surprise, she did not find Tomoe sitting there… and, as her eyes grew bigger and bigger, she realised that this was not the only abnormal thing in the courtyard that morning. A small red-haired man was kneeling in front of the washing tub, turning his back to her.

"Good morning, Kaoru-dono!" he waved cheerfully. "This is almost done."

"What?" The girl walked in disbelief towards the man, who was efficiently scrubbing garment after garment with a smile on his lips. Her big pile of dirty clothes had disappeared, and a new, brilliantly clean one, was lying at his other side. "What are you… doing?"

"Laundry," he answered the obvious. "Did you like the breakfast?"

"Y… y… **_you_**made breakfast?" she stammered, feeling more confused than ever. "I thought it had been one of the other women!"

"No, they haven't got up yet. Megumi-san stayed awake until very late, so I suppose she's tired…"

"Me… Megumi-san?" Slowly, the girl started to regain her footing, and gave the man a suspicious glance. "And _what _were you doing with…? Oh… no… never mind." Realising in time the inconvenience of her impulse, Kaoru blushed furiously, and shook her head. Sometimes, she just _couldn't_ help herself… "Uh, er, I'm… surprised. She was going to leave today, or so she said. Did she… tell you something about that, by chance? That she had changed her mind, perhaps?"

The red-haired man laid the piece of cloth he had been scrubbing back in the tub, and grinned at her obvious hopeful expression.

"In part, yes. I have things to do in this city for a while, and we have decided that she will leave with me afterwards, so she's protected on her way."

"Ah." Kaoru muttered, unable to think of a better answer. "So… you will stay for a while."

"Yes," the wanderer nodded. "By the way, thank you very much for letting me stay here tonight. It's nice to sleep under a roof, for a change."

The girl waved her hands in quick dismissal. "Oh, no! It was the least I could do after… uh, well." Remembering what she had come to say all of a sudden, she blushed a deeper shade of crimson. "I… attacked you yesterday, then you saved me, and then I… instead of saying thank you…"

The red-haired man dried his hands carefully and granted her an encouraging smile as he got up.

"Don't worry about that."

"Bu… but…" Before he could leave, Kaoru made a motion to stop him. "Wait a minute, you!"

"Oro?"

The girl tried to ignore the clueless stare, concentrating only on what she had to say. She knew that it was a bad habit of hers, that she wasn't used to apologise, but he was making it doubly difficult with his annoying attitude!

"I only wanted to say that, about what I said to you yesterday night, and about my attitude, I… am sorry."

The man's eyes widened in astonishment, and he put a hand to her forehead.

"Are you feeling well, Kaoru-dono?"

That was definitely _too _much for the girl. Feeling her self-restraint crumble in front of so much blockheadedness, she threw herself against him and kicked him inside the tub.

"I was simply _trying _to apologise, you… you…!"

"Ah, so it was that!" he exclaimed, once his head had popped again among the bubbles. _Still _smiling, she realised in dismay, feeling a bit sorry for what she had done. There was something… unsettling about kicking people who didn't kick back. "A wanderer does not worry about little things like that. And you don't need to, either."

Confused, she lent him a hand out of instinct, and helped him to pull his weight upwards. He was surprisingly light, or maybe it was just that her arms had grown too strong after so much kenjutsu. As she had that thought, she could not help but wonder what would that man be thinking deep inside of the womanliness of a girl who let him do all the housework and then kicked him inside a tub…

_Oh, no, again_. What stupidities was she thinking? She hadn't _let_ him do the housework, he had done it because he had wanted, and well, maybe she hadn't meant to kick him so hard…

"By the way, Kaoru-dono, I must say I have never encountered such a high pile of laundry in any house. You must be terribly busy with your dojo…"

A kick sent him flying back to the tub with a splash.

"I-**_didn't_**-ask-for-your-help!"

"Orororooo…"

The girl growled, turning away to enter the house again. As she was going to do so, though, a shocked gasp reached her ears, and she could distinguish Megumi-san's silhouette standing at the doorstep.

"Good morning, Megumi-san," she offered, a bit testily.

"What… what do you think you're doing?" the older woman cried, running towards the tub and helping the twice soaked man out of it. In her face, there was a strange mix of deep astonishment and anger. "Are you… are you alright, Himura-san?"

_Himura-san?_

"So that's your name?" Kaoru asked, turning back again. The short man shook his head to dry his hair a bit, and the girl could see Megumi giving him an awkward glance before he nodded.

"Family name," he specified. "But I wonder… has something happened to your other boarder?"

"Tomoe-san? Oh, it's true!" In her surprise about having forgotten, the girl almost missed the sudden flash of emotions that showed for a brief instant in the face of the man. Megumi, however, was able to perceive its full impact, and scratched her hair pensively. "I'm going to have a look in her bedroom. Oh, and by the way, Himura… why don't you stay here with us? Megumi-san's room won't be free for you now, but you can sleep in the dojo, right?"

"Uh… er…" Megumi looked shocked, and she sent another furtive look to the red-haired man's direction. He smiled to her first, and then turned back towards Kaoru.

"I thank you deeply for the offer," he said, bowing. "Unfortunately, there are things that I must do in this city, and I'm not sure about how much time they will take. It would be very unaccommodating for you, Kaoru-dono."

The girl could not help but shake her head to herself. For a wanderer, he was certainly _quite _a character, that she had to admit.

"Well, then I have an idea," she smiled sweetly. "You will have a bed and food here, and you are invited to come and use them whenever you want. I _still _haven't apologised properly," she remembered with a sigh.

The man seemed to think about this for several instants in silence, then bowed again.

"Thank you very much for your kind invitation," he replied in a low voice.

"Wonderful!" the girl exclaimed, with a suddenly dangerous gleam in her eyes. "Now you can get ready!"

"Ready?"

"Yes, we're going shopping!" Kaoru explained. She could use some help and some opportunities to get to know more about his secrets by herself, she thought in a brief bout of self-satisfaction. "I'm so glad to have someone to help me carry the things!"

"O…oro?" the wanderer asked to the already disappearing back of his - prospective- new landlady.

* * *

**_Takani Megumi_**

_What on Earth was he thinking about?_

The woman gave a deep look at the wanderer, and repressed a sigh when his only reaction was a smile. In a brisk pace, she turned her back to him and crossed the courtyard to get inside the house with her mind in pure turmoil.

So he had not only preferred to lie to Kaoru about the true reasons of her stay. He had also given a perfect excuse that saved her even the trouble of inventing something, and Kaoru, of course, had believed what he had said. Of her deepest and innermost fear, which had been having to tell the truth now that the situation had changed, there hadn't even been the question. And, to her surprise, something inside her wasn't sure about whether this was good or bad.

_What does he intend? That we stay here, that he helps us with our problems, and that she remains in total ignorance about who caused them and why? After a while, this is bound to come out…or, maybe…_

Maybe, she thought, what he was offering her was an opportunity of telling the truth herself, without intermediaries or revealing events taking place. Last night, he had told her that she deserved to be happy… but…

_Happy? With my past burdening me and making everybody change the way they look at me? Does **he **tell who he is?_ After all, she remembered, it was not only because of her that the so-called Battousai was terrifying the dojo and the city. If he hadn't been using a certain person's _name, _people wouldn't have had such reverential fear of him. Right now, when she had pronounced that family name tentatively, he had already looked stressed, probably not unaware of the fact that the girl was too ignorant to know that the man she was chasing after was supposed to be called Himura Battousai.

_Oh, don't be unfair, _she chided herself almost at once. He was fighting hard to solve any problem he might have caused to other people, while she was running away. And, didn't those people deserve to know the reason why they had been in danger in the first place?

_But I can't. I just…can't_! another part of her complainedAfter living in various places and travelling aimlessly for long, she had finally found a stable place where, for the first time, she did care about being watched with kindly eyes by its inhabitants. According to him, she had two options: leaving and being unhappy and staying and being happy, but wouldn't she be terribly unhappy if she stayed and lost the appreciation of those people forever? For this, she might as well leave, and save everybody the trouble!

_She feels horror of being alone again_.

The man's words did not cease to echo heavily in her mind. They had made her discover last night that, in spite of her pledge of atonement, she was so dreadfully selfish that she was even unable to recognise a deep motivation inside someone which was the same as hers. She should have them in mind at least now, it was the least she could do. But, even taking them into account… did Himura-san _really _think that she would be happy to have an opium dealer, no, an opium _maker_ at home? She was naïve, all right, she trusted people too much, all right, but who would trust someone who was _evidently _a very bad person? It was too much to ask of anyone who hadn't ever shared a similarly guilty past.

_Well, and now, **what** should I do?_

Disgusted at the patheticness of her own question, the doctor shrugged her nose. Why did she have to need all the help she could get all of a sudden? Hadn't she fended off alone for all her life?

"Megumi-san!"

"Uh?" Surprised in the middle of her intense musings, the woman lifted her head. Kaoru was running towards her, her face creased with lines of worry. "What's the matter?"

"It's Tomoe-san," the girl answered in a ragged breath. "She's… she's ill."

"Ill?" Megumi closed her eyes in surprise, and tried to remember her exchanges with the woman the previous day. She hadn't looked to be… "Don't worry. I will take a look at her now. And don't make such noise! In fact," she added, heading towards her room to gather her medicinal box. "it's better that you leave and go shopping. Is it fever?"

"I don't know what it is, but she is in bed, and she looks awful," Kaoru explained, with clear hints of anxiety in her voice. She panicked easily when facing cases of sickness of disease, Megumi imagined that because she had some childhood trauma with her mother's fate.

_In this, again, they were completely different._

"Nothing is going to happen to her. Now, hurry and get that food. Things get sold very soon at the Tokyo market," she repeated, thinking at the same time that if the girl decided to stay there in spite of her words she would go insane on someone. Fortunately, Kaoru had kept enough levelheadedness as to do as she was told.

"Well… if you don't need me, and really think that I'm a hindrance, I'll leave," she sighed. "I trust you more than any other doctor, Megumi-san."

_Trust you._

"I'm no doctor yet," the woman grumbled, heading towards Tomoe's room.

* * *

The room was dark and stifling, but Megumi's practiced nose could not detect the slightest trace of any smell of decay as she came in, bracing herself for the worst. While her eyes slowly grew accustomed to the dark, she tiptoed towards the futon from where the exhausted silhouette of her friend stared at her with eerie brown eyes, and knelt at her side.

"What's the matter, Tomoe-san?" she asked, taking her observation tools out of the bag. The older woman lifted her face, and Megumi swallowed strongly when she checked how pale she was. Even more, there were pronounced dark circles under her eyes, and she looked overall as if she hadn't slept at all in all night. "Do you feel pain? Discomfort?"

Tomoe nodded vehemently to both questions. Megumi bit her lip in surprise.

"Let me see," she mumbled, as she started her checking operations. She touched her forehead several times, looked inside her mouth, felt her pulse, and then began a quick inspection for any other external things like wounds or rashes in the most usual places. Tomoe let her do all those things meekly, with her eyes fixed at some point of the ceiling above her heads and her lips now and then forming unknown words that she would never be able to pronounce.

Megumi's perplexity augmented at each passing moment.

"You…" Little by little adopting a dead serious expression, she leaned back and sat down. "You are _not _ill, Tomoe-san. Not in any way that I know of."

For a long while of heavy silence, both women stood each other's glance. Finally, it was Tomoe who shifted position, and made a demanding gesture with her hand.

"What do you… you're pointing at your diary?" When the older woman nodded, Megumi's eyes widened. "And _this_ too?" she added as she saw her point as well at the writing tools that lay next to it. Tomoe sat down with a lot of visible effort, and extending her hands towards both things.

_What's that supposed to… mean?_ The doctor could not believe her eyes. Tomoe… wanting to write something for her? Since she had known her, in all those months, she had never ever written anything for the purpose of communication, and Kaoru said that the only thing she had written for her had been a single kanji, her name, on the day of her arrival. This had actually been one of the main arguments that the doctor had needed to build the theory that Tomoe wasn't mute from birth, since it showed that the main disorder behind that deficiency was less inability than sheer, strong unwillingness. There had been something in her past that was strong enough as to fill her with such horror for offering _concrete _information, of transmitting a message through unequivocal words… and now, something equally strong must have happened, if she was going to force herself to master her trauma.

Tomoe sat on her bed, and dipped the brush in the ink. Carefully, as if she was doing herself some kind of violence, she wrote something on a white sheet and handed it to Megumi.

_Please, _she read. _Help me._

"Help… you?" the woman asked, almost speechless. That desperate plea… that state… "What has happened to you, Tomoe-san?"

But the woman did not write anymore. Sadly, she shook her head, and turned again an imploring glance towards the doctor, who had to force herself to repress a sigh of frustration.

"If you aren't going to tell me, how should I help you?" she grumbled. "You should take walks outside, and you would sleep much better. Those problems would then disa… uh?"

Tomoe shook her head again, now with more desperation. For Megumi, who had learned to interpret her signs long ago, it looked like a desperate denial.

"I can't say that you are ill, if that's what you want. You _aren't _ill!" she exclaimed, sitting at her side again. "And why would you want to be ill, anyway? Is there something funny in staying…?"

_…staying?_

A sparkle of realisation dawned in her mind.

"You don't want to go out. It's this, isn't it?"

Tomoe's eyes lingered for a while in the folds of her lap before she nodded in inevitable confirmation.

"Is it because…?" Megumi's mind worked quickly. "Because of someone? Someone who bothers you? We will be here with you all the time, I promise, and that Battousai impersonator will be taken care of soon. Or maybe you don't want to be with us anymore? Or is it…?"

Shaking her head furiously, the older woman seemed to be asking her to stop theorising at once. The doctor, though, was too far advanced in her reasonings as to pay heed to her pleas this time. She suddenly felt as if she was touching the surface of a sinister affair, rooted deeply since long ago.

"It's… it's _him_, isn't it? You know who he is," she asked at last in a quiet, composed voice. "Heavens, you… you know him, too!"

Nothing, in spite of her premonitions, could have prepared Megumi for what Tomoe did now. After staring at her for some instants, her face as white as a sheet, she lay back on her futon, and pulled the sheets all over her head.

"To… Tomoe-san…?" _This is pitiful! Why…?_

There was no doubt now: her companion had had an encounter with the hitokiri Battousai in the Bakumatsu. But… what kind of encounter, and what had he done to her? _Could this_ be the reason why she couldn't speak?

Truth was, she almost had a shudder when she thought of it.

"Tomoe-san!" she insisted with more determination this time, even if her decision capacity was far lower than usual. Effectively, there were two options in front of her now. On the one hand, if she supported Tomoe's scheme, she would undoubtedly save a lot of pain to both. Himura-san had suffered enough, and she felt he deserved some help now and then. But, if, on the other hand, she could _show_ to Tomoe-san… if she could make her have a glimpse on how much this person whose very remembrance terrified her had changed, and how much good he harboured inside, maybe…

_Would she let escape the only chance to heal her desperation, bring her out of her shel, and protect her from getting even worse?_

"Well, this is _exactly _the kind of problem that I was lacking right now.," she muttered between clenched teeth. The huddle of blankets did not even move, and she sighed again.

"Tomoe-san… I think you are getting him… wrong," she began, after thinking hard for a while. She had rarely - _never-_ felt so stupid at the beginning of a speech. "I do not know what… happened to you back then, and in which degree he was involved, but I think I know better about him than you now. He wasn't the impostor who was killing people here in Tokyo, that man that drove all students out from Kaoru-san's dojo. In fact, he's a _completely_ different man from the legendary monster of popular imagination."

There was some motion of the blankets at last, and Megumi could see a head emerging from under them. Tomoe's eyes had lost their despairing gleam, and were now watching her with an enigmatic expression.

_So she was interested, after all…_

"As you probably know, he disappeared after the battle of Toba-Fushimi, and everybody lost his track ever since," the doctor continued, significantly encouraged. "That's why there are so many legends about him, but the truth, the real truth, is in none of them. He left because he wanted to change his life, because he felt very strongly about what he had done. He wanted to atone for all the crimes he had committed, and for this he took a reversed sword that did not kill and became a wandering swordsman, protecting all the people who needed it without taking any more lives. He's been wandering for ten years now, tirelessly, helping people in his way and standing up against injustice… and this has shaped his personality in a very different direction."

Megumi made a pause to look at Tomoe again, but when she did so the words fled from her mouth from the surprise. She looked almost in trance, with a glance filled with astonished…. _delighted? _curiosity intently fixed on her.

_Why does she…why does she look happy, all of a sudden,_ the younger woman wondered. It was almost… she didn't know, but for a moment, it seemed to her as if Tomoe-san was feeling _for _him, instead than for herself, her own feelings and her safety like mere moments before. As if her feelings suddenly mirrored Megumi's, with the deep fondness that she felt for him and the wish to see him happy that she had harboured since that day on which he had saved her.

"Two years ago, he did me _such _a favour that I will be grateful to him for all my life. I don't know where I would be now if he hadn't helped me," she added in a low voice, as if talking to herself. Tomoe joined her trembling hands over her lap and… _smiled._

"But well… do as you wish," The doctor recovered her composure as quick as she could, and got up with a shake of her head. "If you want to stay here all the time, I won't raise any objection. I don't want to see any of you two hurt."

When she closed the shoji behind her back and left, Megumi failed to see Tomoe's gradual change of expression, and the tear that tricked down her cheek while she slowly sank back on her couch.

* * *

**_Kamiya Kaoru_**

"Himura…"

"Uh… yes, Kaoru-dono?"

The wandering swordsman cocked his head to the side, his lips curving in an absent smile. A red drop trickled down his cheek, and glittered briefly in the morning sun before it stained the ground.

"Your wound of yesterday," she observed, a bit shyly. After crossing the bridge, they had got very close to the marketplace, and the quantity of people that hurried and chatted through the streets had increased very much. They could even hear the shouts of the vendors already, announcing their goods from the distance.

"Ah," he nodded, wiping the blood away as if it was no big thing. In the expression of his eyes, though, Kaoru was for a moment unable to perceive any matched carelessness. "It's of no importance, that it isn't."

"Hmmmh.," she mumbled wistfully, as she turned her head away to stare at the reflection of the sunrays in the nearby river. What a strange man…

"Could you tell me…?" she started, but as usual stopped herself immediately before she finished the sentence. Now, what should she ask first? There were so many things she wanted to ask that it was becoming almost intolerable, while he kept walking happily and whistling a tune as if nothing had happened at all. Maybe he was doing all this just to spite her, Kaoru theorised angrily to herself.

"Could you tell me why do you carry a reversed sword? Are you good at swordsmanship? And, what's your na… uh?"

The girl stopped in her tracks, finding herself alone. While she looked left and right, worried and pissed at the man's sudden disappearance, a woman's angry voice reached her ears from behind her back. The wanderer was there, apologising profusely to a fat lady whose groceries had been accidentally scattered and helping her to collect them back.

_Is this supposed to answer one of my questions, _she wondered, as a corner of her mouth started to twitch uncontrollably.

"Look well where you're going!" the woman grumbled, taking the groceries from his hands with an ungracious push. "Now I'll have to wash all this again!"

"Sorry. I'm really sorry," he continued with his apologies even after she was gone. Kaoru watched him scramble to his feet, and then turned her back on him again to continue walking.

_I wonder how you did manage to save me yesterday_, she whispered to herself, not for the first time in that morning.

"Himura, hurry up! The first shop is there in front of us, and there are quite a number of people there already. If we don't want to return at an impossible hour…"

"Eh… Excuse me, Kaoru-dono," he interrupted her, wiping the dust from his hakama. "If you don't mind, I'll wait for you outside, that I will."

"Outside?" The girl lifted her head, surprised. "Why?"

"Well…" he hesitated. "I have some things to do in this city. And besides… there might be some problems if I enter anywhere carrying a sword."

"Sword?" Kaoru's glance immediately travelled towards the man's obi, and they almost came out of their sockets when she realised that he had been carrying _that _thing all along. "What are you doing here with your sword?"

"Uh… sorry," he apologised. "I'm used to bring it anywhere with me, that I am. Just because there might be some problems anywhere."

"Problems?" the girl thundered. "Are you the greatest troublemaker in Japan, or what?"

"Well, problems might be anywhere. They don't have to concern this unworthy one directly," he answered defensively. "For example, it was someone else who got into one last night…"

_Well, **that **was aimed low.,_ Kaoru growled to herself, feeling her cheeks flush in spite of her efforts. "Fine, do what you want. But be there in an hour. And if the police arrests you, I _won't _help you!"

"Yes, Kaoru-dono," he replied. The girl watched him bow and leave, and shrugged her shoulders in irritation before entering the mass of people.

_I'd wish so much to know what's up with him…_

The shopping for rice and miso took her longer than expected, as she had to fight for it with a really huge crowd. When at last she came out with her prize safely stored in two heavy buckets, she found that she had already been there for an hour, and realised with dismay that she still had to go to the tofu shop.

_And he isn't here yet…,_ she thought, a bit worried. Would he have got into problems? Searching with her glance among the people that crowded the streets, she didn't realise that someone was approaching her, and almost dropped the food in fright when she felt a hand over her shoulder.

"Uh… aaaah!" she gasped, while she managed somehow to catch it in time. "Sheesh, almost! Who…?"

Three policemen stood in front of her.

"Excuse me, young lady, for the derangement," one of them greeted her politely. "We are interrogating the people in the street about a man we're searching. Have you seen by chance a man with a sword around this street today?"

"A… _what_?" Kaoru's face dropped, and she felt her heart beat quicker inside her chest. What had that red-haired stubborn walking disaster got himself into while he wasn't with her? "What kind of… man?" she asked, more than a bit lamely.

"Oh, sorry for scaring you," another of the policemen added, with a smile that told her that he probably didn't regret it _that _much. "But you'd better be careful around here these days. A dangerous murderer has been seen around this zone several times already, and this very morning a man with a sword was seen around. It's highly believed it could be the hitokiri Battousai from the Kamiya dojo."

A huge vein popped out Kaoru's forehead in a fraction of a second.

"What. Did. You. Say?" The buckets with the miso and the rice fell to the ground with an ominous thud. "Repeat it, if you dare!"

The policemen looked at each other in astonishment.

"Is there any problem?" one of them asked. Kaoru swallowed deeply, in a last unsuccessful attempt to keep her self-control. She wanted desperately to stay clear of any problem, to just retrieve her things and turn back with a smile. But she couldn't take it any more, she couldn't, she couldn't… It felt as if all her momentarily forgotten frustration had come back in a sudden rush!

"My dojo doesn't have anything to do with that monster! Anything, do you hear! He's just a filthy impostor!"

"What? Do you dare to defy an agent of the law?" the one which had spoken first said, making a step in her direction. Kaoru stayed in place, her hands on her hips.

"Agent of law? Don't make me laugh! Cease hiding behind your uniform and come here if you d… ouch!" Her shout ended abruptly in an astonished complaint as she felt something hitting her over the head. No one of the policemen had moved, and when she scanned her surroundings, she was unable to find anyone susceptible of being the author of the stupid joke. "What…?"

"What's the matter now?" one of the policemen asked tiredly.

"Someone has just hit me in the head," she answered, fuming. "Don't you see?"

"What do you think?" The first policeman turned towards his companions, who nodded gravely.

"She's crazy," the second attested.

"_What_ did you call me?"

"Let's leave her alone. We have more urgent business now," the third suggested. Accepting his advice, his two companions turned his back on the furious girl and disappeared behind the crowd, headless to her threats.

"Hey! Come back! This is a power abuse! Come back and you'll see…!"

"Kaoru-dono! Who are you yelling at?"

"Uh?" The girl closed her mouth, and turned back to find the wanderer standing behind her and holding the miso and the rice that she had dropped. "When did you arrive?"

"Right now," he answered with a grin. "You were talking loudly and you alerted me, that you did. What happened?"

"I… uh… well, I…" she stammered, her anger quickly melting into shame. She'd _never _tell anyone about what had just happened. _Never._ "There were… three policemen, asking for _you. _They said that a man with a sword had been seen around this place. You're too careless!"

The red haired man did not look impressed at this.

"Let's go back home then. We have both solved our business here, that we have."

The girl took a sharp intake of breath, and dropped her shoulders as she started to walk down the street with him. She didn't know why, but she felt currently… exhausted.

"Fine," she surrendered. "Let's go home."

* * *

_He comes with me carrying his sword, and then leaves me alone in a crowd while he goes to solve some business that he doesn't want to tell me about. Then, those three jerks appear and insult my father's name **yet **again. I lose my patience, and as I'm arguing with them someone hits me in the head and disappears. They call me crazy and leave, and then, mysteriously, he returns with a grin on his face. In the end, I forget the darn tofu, and when we arrive here he disappears again without telling me where he's going and says he won't be back until tonight or tomorrow. Tomoe-san is ill and refuses to see anyone, and Megumi-san is so weird that she even abstains from making any comments about the food I forgot to buy. And, on top of everything, my wound hurts and they won't let me search for the murderer in three thousand years. Argggh! I feel as if I might be going crazy in truth! _

Kaoru was certainly not feeling well that night, as she crossed the yard to enter the ample and familiar privacy of her dojo. All days had been fairly trying for her of late, but that one took the prize. And now, when night had fallen putting an end to it at last, she unexpectedly found that she could not sleep.

_If only I was thinking about ways of defending my father's reputation and making the students come back to my dojo…But no…I am not. I can't…_

In spite of Megumi-san's strong recommendations, Kaoru's hands picked a wooden sword almost instinctively, and she began to practice with liberating fury. Probably she was just feeling restless and frustrated because the affair hadn't been solved yet, she had no students anymore, one of her friends was ill and another was going to leave soon. It _should_ be that, at least. On her past expeditions the clues she had gathered had been scarce, and she was in no shape to chase after them. She had told some to Megumi-san and some to Himura, but they were probably as helpless as she was. Besides… well, she was perfectly conscious of the fact that it wasn't their business.

"It's **my **business. My business and no one else's,"she admonished herself, breathing heavily at the end of a kata. "I will find you and I will destroy you in my father's name!"

"Excuse me…"

"Huh?" Surprised, the girl lowered her weapon, and looked behind her to search for the source of the voice. To her great horror and disbelief, the dojo shoji broke with a crash, and a giant silhouette surrounded by many others stepped in behind the splinters. "Wh… what…?"

"Did you, by any chance" a mocking voice greeted her with a laugh, "mean _me, _Kamiya-san?"

(to be continued)


	5. Chapter 5

Well, and this is chapter five. I had it scribbled on a paper somewhere since long ago, and, since Fate made me find it, I decided to honour the circumstance by typing it down and publishing it. It´s not the end of the whole projected fic, just the end of the first part... and still, if I am to be completely honest, I can tell you that I doubt I will write anything else related to this story any time soon. Sorry. At least it´s not as if you hadn´t already got used to the idea of this fic being discontinued by my year-long delays.

(And I suppose that one day I will get interested in the subject again, and may even find it, though I´m not too much into writing right now.)

As always, I thank all my reviewers effusively, and especially those who were still waiting for this fic after so many months. You made me happy, and also sad, in a sense, as I don´t feel like I can give you any more.

Chapter Five 

Takani Megumi 

****

The doctor got up in a suddenly worried rush, and tiptoed towards the door from where the noises that had roused her from her sleep were coming from. She could see the light of torches at the gates of the dojo and, as her heart started to beat at an increasingly quick pace inside her chest, she distinguished the voices of many men.

_Kaoru-san._

Not allowing her mind to be paralysed by the growing terror, Megumi´s immediate reaction was to get inside the house and check whether the girl was in her own room. When she discovered that it wasn´t so, her legs failed her and she collapsed on her knees in the floor, overwhelmed.

They were there. They were there for her, and for Kaoru, who had got in the way. Himura-san wasn´t with them, and nobody could save that stupid girl. That stubborn, stupid girl…

But no. She could not allow herself to be carried away _now_ of all moments. She had to think, and concentrate in the best course to follow. Whar could she do, with her limited means, to stop anything horrible from happening?

You won´t escape me, ever. You will be mine for the rest of your life, whether you want or not.

Megumi shuddered, and laid a pair of glassy eyes on the floor. She could flee, run far from the place before anybody noticed that she was there. She could start again somewhere else…

_Start again? _another inner voice chimed in almost immediately. How could she ever start again anywhere while knowing that corpses, two corpses, had ben once more left in her wake? That girl, who didn´t know anything but naively could not stand to see her leave because she was afraid of being alone, who thought that everything that happened was her fault, and recklessly tried to solve it herself. And Tomoe-san, encased on a fragile shell that could not stand any blow from the outside world, and who had finally found a troubled rest in a small room of that dojo. Both trampled, and then hauled aside by the people who were searching for her because of the things she did in the past.

_And he? _What would he think? Would he still believe that she could atone, that she was doing everything she could to make things right?

Curving her lips in a wry smile, the woman got up and went to her clothes box to search mechanically for a haori. If she jumped in the middle of the fray now, there was nothing that she could possibly achieve. She could search for Himura-san, but she did not know where he could be at the moment, and in the case that she could find him somehow, it would already be too late. The best thing she could do was to sneak away in the darkness while they weren´t paying attention and search for help…the police was the only option.

They can discover you. They can point at you, give you away, saying "this is the woman who killed so many innocents with the cobweb opium". See? There´s no escape.

_Never…_

Megumi swallowed deeply, and shook her head before starting to run past the darkness of the house, and past the fearsome brightness of the turmoil. To be discovered was terrible, and even more terrible to be trapped again in the shadows that she had tried so hard to forget. But, to be afraid for all her life, and be reduced by her fear to a wretched mockery of a human was much worse. _It was worse._

After the torches of the false Battousai´s men were left behind in the distance, houses, alleys and streets succeeded each other at a vertiginous speed in the woman´s mad run. There wasn´t anyone out there at those hours, and the police quarters weren´t too near to the place. Terrible thoughts about what would happen if they didn´t arrive quickly enough began plaguing her mind, panicking her so much that she refused herself even a stop to regain her breath. Faster….some way, _somehow_, she had to be faster.

"Megumi-dono!"

Feeling as if if she had suddenly been victim of a hallucination, the doctor saw the floor beckoning her, and her body fell into the man´s hesitant arms.

"You…! _Quick!_" she was able to utter between heavy gasps for breath. "Kaoru…"

"I know." he said. Surprised, the woman lifted her eyes to meet his, and realised that they were clouded by an urgent concern. His breath came out irregularly too, which could only mean that he had also come running. " I´m sorry…. I could not gather the information until now. But tell me what has happened."

"They are at the dojo…and Kaoru-san is probably there too." Megumi explained. "I was able to escape and went searching for help. Please, be quick! Don´t worry about me!"

The wanderer´s eyes widened as his mind processed the information. Immediately, his hand travelled towards the hilt of his sword, and in a second he was gone.

_Godlike speed._

Megumi arranged her hair and clothes a bit, while she tried to muster all the energies that she needed in order to follow his trail towards the battleground. In one of the motions, her hand touched inadvertently the spot where his arm had rested mere moments ago, and it remained there for the additional length of a fleeting moment.

Somehow, it felt better now.

**_Kamiya Kaoru_**

****

"So it´s you…" The girl retreated two involuntary steps, but grasped her wooden sword in a firmer grip. "Battousai has deigned at last to show his face and answer to my challenge!"

"Could be said so." the giant man sneered, taking his mask away to reveal a brutish countenance adorned by a long, dark beard. "You were getting a little too persistent."

Several of the men who came with him laughed at the joke, and Kaoru needed an effort to keep her calm. She wanted answers before the inevitable fight.

"What grudge do you have against my dojo?"

"Against your dojo?" Battousai stared at her for some instants, then let go of a laugh. "What makes you think that I have anything against your dojo? I like it very much, in fact…that´s why I´m making such efforts for it to be mine!"

Kaoru loosened her hold on her sword and for a moment, in spite of all her precautions, her face registered the full impact of her shock. This made Battousai´s minions laugh even harder.

"So… you did _all_ this because you want my dojo?" she cried.

"This, and a woman who lives with you." the monster answered with a grin. "I would pay the Chief with her, and Older Brother would be happy."

"A woman…who lives with me? The _Chief?_" The girl´s eyes widened. Though she was wise enough as to regain her stance before anyone could take advantage of it, her mind was suddenly thrown in turmoil, and she almost staggered under the weight of the unexpected information. _What _did they want with the women who lived with her? What could any of her friends have to do with such a…with such a gang?

_No…impossible!_

"Which woman are you searching for?" she asked, defiantly but curious at the same time. "Tell me!"

Battousai frowned.

"Don´t play the fool with me, girl. You won´t be harmed if you comply with my wishes and give me the dojo together with the woman!"

"But _who _is she?" the girl cried, feeling the familiar taste of frustration embittering her tone. Maybe that was why Megumi-san had wanted to leave that morning. Maybe that could also be why Tomoe-san did not want to go out from her room all of a sudden…couldn´t she have feigned her illness?

But probably, her mind resolved as she shook her head to dispel those unfair suspicions, it was just that stupid criminal trying to make up stories to confuse her without even knowing whom he was talking about. And not very brilliantly, she had to add.

"I want the woman who is staying with you in your house at this very moment. "the man explained, as helpfully as before. Kaoru could perceive now a certain tinge of impatience in his voice. _Damn bastard…_

"I won´t suffer any of my friends, my father, my style or my dojo to be insulted by a filthy murderer of the likes of you!" she shouted, raising her sword to prepare her first attack. If they were minimally honourable, the minions would stay away from the fight and she would have a chance. If they weren´t…. well, did she have any other choice?

"If you want anything from my house, you´ll have to fight me first!"

Battousai smiled disagreeably, and unsheathed his steel-forged, killing sword. In spite of her determination, Kaoru could not help but shiver as she remembered the outcome of their previous encounter, when her wooden sword had been cut by the sharp edge of his blade.

_Did she **really **have a chance?_

"Let´s fight, then." he conceded. "It could be fun. Everybody, stand aside! I want to kill the woman alone."

Between sneers and loud side coments, the men all did as they were told, and Kaoru was left alone to face the gigantic figure of the legendary killer. Swallowing the knot in her throat, she decided to shorten the agony and lunged forwards for the man´s side, hoping that he wouldn´t have time to counter the surprise attack. Battousai´s hand grasped the blunt weapon, and broke it in two in a bout of strength.

_Game over._

"How could you ever think that you would defeat me with a toy weapon?" the monster sneered, as he grabbed her by her clothes and lifted her feet from the ground. "Do you _really_ believe in those stupid preachings of your useless sword style? Kenjutsu is violence and its essence is none other than death! Anyone who doesn´t understand this won´t be ever to teach anything or to have a dojo, let alone to face the hitokiri Battousai!"

Kaoru struggled to free herself from the humiliating position, but stopped when she realised that her efforts only led to suffocate her and quench her breath more and more. Tears of despair fell down her cheeks, every fiber of her being revolting against those horrible words that crushed and negated everything that her father and her had ever believed and fought for.

"Swords…are for protecting." she hissed. "They shouldn´t be used….to kill!"

The grip of the monster loosened, and her ears were filled with a loud, hideous laughter.

"Oh, really? Then, why isn´t any sword protecting you _now_?"

The girl opened her mouth to answer, but closed it again as the words fled her mind in a vertiginous whirl.

_Wouldn't all those ideals be nothing more than a joke if you let yourself be killed for them?_

In a last, mad struggle, the girl tried to kick her enemy, to bite or scratch him away with her remaining forces. The broken remnant of her wooden sword fled her grasp, and it fell to the floor at their feet with a smothered noise.

_Father, I´m….sorry…_

"Let go of her at once."

The pression of Battousai´s hand suddenly disminished, and Kaoru saw everyone´s faces turning towards the dojo gate. That voice….

_…could it be…?_

"You again!"

The red-haired wanderer withstood their glances with a matter-of-fact composure that seemed in deep contrast with Kaoru´s worried evaluation of his possibilities, so much that it made her cringe. Idiot, idiot, he realise…?

"No, don´t!" she shouted with all her remaining forces. There was a knot in her throat as she imagined him challenging Battousai with his useless bravery, and being slicd in two, thrown dead to the floor….for her sake. "You can´t… you can´t face this man! He´s too strong!"

"Who are you?" the killer demanded in disdain. "Another one of those idiots who believe that swords are for protecting?"

Furious again, Kaoru attempted a new struggle to free herself. If she could regain the floor….if she _only _could regain the floor, maybe…

"No."

The girl´s body went limp, and her eyes were set on her rescuer in disbelief. In fact, now that she payed attention to her expression, she suddenly thought that she started to spot some….different things about him. The everpresent silly smile had left his lips without leaving any traces, and his wide, innocent eyes were narrowed to calculating slits. His sword was still inside its sheath, but Kaoru could perceive a strong ki around him, and a chain of movements that showed that, behind a relaxed attitude, he was guarding each of the enemy´s openings against any sudden attack. He looked like a swordsman, she realised, though not quite like the ones who surrounded him.

_He looked like a **real** swordsman._

"Uh?" Battousai had at last got over his surprise enough as to regain his sneerng attitude. "What are you saying?"

"The sword is a weapon. Kenjutsu is the art of killing. That´s all there is to it, no matter which beautiful words you may choose to describe it." the wanderer continued, walking some steps towards them. "Kaoru-dono´s beliefs are those of a person who has never had to soil her hands. An idealistic joke."

Kaoru did not want to hear more, but she was unable to do anything except watching in fearful fascination how the polite little funny man turned in front of her eyes into someone dangerous and unknown. To think that she had even compared him to her father in her inner musings…. could he really have been such a consummated actor?

_You trust too much._

Probably, she answered to herself while a tear tricked down her cheek. Probably she did.

"Still." The tear froze in mid-way, and the girl opened her eyes again. What she saw almost lost her completely, for the silly smile was back, the violet eyes had widened, and he even seemed to have dropped his guard. Once more, he looked every inch like the clumsy man she had grown to like and trust, and her confusion reached its highest limits.

_Who was the real Himura anymore?_

"This unworthy one will confess that his wish is that her idealistic joke became true in a world to come. I like it much better than the true nature of kenjutsu."

Even though she could not quite forget his previous appearance, or the danger that they were both in, Kaoru could not help but curve her lips in a tentative smile.

"Damn you!" Battousai sounded mad, as if he felt that he had been made a fool by his opponent. "Attack him now!"

"No!" Kaoru cried, horrified. All the men inside the dojo save the one holding her got into clumsy stances, and made a circle around the imperturbable wanderer. Wanderer or swordsman….he had no chance agaisnt so many people, she realised in dismay.

"You can stay back if you don´t want to be hurt." he announced. His opponent sneered, and five men charged at the same time as he laid a hand on the hilt of his katana. Kaoru´s eyes perceived the scintillating blur of a reflection, and then, before she had time to be too sure of what had just happened, she saw five bodies slammed on the floor and walls of the dojo. Some of their companions drew back in terror, others growled in frustration and attacked on turn. One by one, everyone was thrown off balance, projected backwards and reduced to a silent heap by the precise and deadly movements of the red-haired swordsman, who performed at the speed of the gods.

_Swordsman…_

_…killer…?_

The red-haired man finally landed at the centre of the vortex of scattered bodies, with his sword propped against the right shoulder. Nothing challenged him now, except the crushing weight of silence.

"I think I forgot to tell you something."he broke it with his own voice, so uncharacteristically sharp that it reminded Kaoru of the edge of a blade. "The technique of the hitokiri Battousai isn´t the Kamiya Kasshin Ryu, or whatever self-taught technique that you use. It´s Hiten Mitsurugi Ryu, a technique created in the Sengoku era that uses godlike speed to kill several enemies at once… unless using a reversed blade."

"Red hair…A never healing wound in the left cheek…."the thunderstruck young woman heard her captor mutter between clenched teeth. She couldn´t believe it. She couldn´t. It simply… could _not _be. "… the real hitokiri…"

The impostor threw Kaoru back on the ground, and his gigantic body towered over the red-haired swordsman´s small frame.

"I see…" he mulled. "So there´s two of us… but only one can hold the title, isn´t it?"

His opponent´s eyes were crossed by a shadow of… was it sadness?

"So it´s that." he said, calmly getting into a stance again. The other man raised his sword over his head, and slammed it down on the floor in front of him with all his forces. In spite of her shock and confusion of feelings, Kaoru found herself crying in worry.

"N…" But before she ever could finish the word, a lean, quick figure appeared soaring high over the impostor´s head. The hitokiri´s sword connected against his raised hands, and the impact brought him down to the dojo floor in a crashing noise and a rain of splinters. Then, he looked at him briefly, and shook his head with a strange heaviness in his glance.

"I don´t feel the slightest attachment to the name of Battousai. "he explained. "But I couldn´t allow someone like you to use it."

"D…damn you…" the defeated man growled in frustration, trying to get up to no avail. The hitokiri pressed the sharp edge of his blade against his throat in a quick movement.

"I gathered plenty of interesting information in your own dojo at the city outskirts….Hiruma Gohei." he declared. Kaoru watched the scene from the same spot in which she had been discarded like a ragged doll, too overwhelmed by the circumstances as to even move a finger. "Your brother told me about that scheme to get hold of this dojo and use the land for building, and also about that important leader of a criminal sindicate that you had made a deal with."

Gohei made a furious move with his head, as if to deny indignantly what Himura had said, but the red-haired man´s eyes glittered with a spark of amber that put a swift end to all protests.

"Which was the woman that he wanted? Was it _her_?" he asked, pointing at the dojo gate with his chin. Kaoru turned her head also in renewed concern, and her heart almost stopped beating when she distinguished Megumi´s silhouette silently standing there.

"Y…yes…"Defeated, the pitiful figure of the man that had pretended to be the legendary killed lowered his eyes, and surrendered his last bouts of useless defiance. "It w…was the dark haired doctor, the one who was hiding there. I could… I could do as I pleased with… all the rest."

**_Himura Tomoe_**

****

_Flames cracked happily over the family hearth, smothering the soft fall of the snowflakes outside the warm shelter of the small mountain cottage. In this enclosed, secret place, both were at last free from everything that had hurt them in that harsh, cruel world of lies, deceits and violence, unseen by the prying eyes of those who would bring their unhappiness and refuse them those guilty illusions of innocence. They were alone, in a world of fire and snow._

_Tomoe snuggled even closer to Kenshin, afraid in her subconscious that something was bound to shatter that instant of peace and take them apart. Exhausted, she closed her eyes, and allowed herself to relish in the gentle embrace like nothing else had ever mattered in her life._

_He was so young! He hadn´t even known how to do it properly; that funny scandalised look of shock and suspicion at how his body was surrendering to an incontrollable urge had never disappeared from his eyes wholly. How many times should he have been told to crush any weakness or distraction before the enemy used it to destroy him, that was something that Tomoe had wondered about many times, only to feel a pang of sorrow and regret in her heart afterwards. Wasn´t that what she was doing also? Wasn´t she trying to destroy him, to stab that red-haired, quietly happy yet regretful medicine peddler who believed he would come to fulfill at last his hidden dreams of a new life far away from the horror, and grieved silently for the things he had done? Wasn´t she going to plunge her knife in the most fatal of all his weaknesses, the newfound trust in his heart, his love, his sanity?_

_"Tomoe."_

_"Yes?" she purred, resting her head on his shoulder. Their skins were still brilliant with the sweat of their lovemaking, already a blurred sweet memory that would never fade completely from the minds of either._

_His next words came only after a while, and they were uttered in a strangely quiet, thoughtful tone._

_"Once all this is over, I will learn how to protect people without killing. Tomoe... I swear that I will protect your happiness."_

_Her lips hesitated for a bit, before curving into the warmth of her first real smile since the world and the people who had ever wanted to protect her had faded away from her sight forever. His eyes looked full of hope, of serious determination but also of joy at the certainty of a distant yet real liberation. The steely coldness of the amber of the walking corpse had gone how, replaced by the warm glow of the life that was awaiting him. Once this was over…_

_In that moment, for the first time, Tomoe knew for certain that she had failed. Prisoner in her own trap, she would give her life to assure that he could have that life he so wished and deserved. Because his wish of living was far greater than what hers would ever be, she would die for him._

_It was meant to be like this._

He had fulfilled his promise. Tomoe rolled over her bed, and pressed her face against the covers to quench the tears of joy, mingled with all those tears of sadness and guilt that also welled from her eyes once the wall had been torn to pieces. He had fulfilled his promise to a woman who had ruined him, been faithful to the memory of the person who had betrayed his trust. Maybe he remembered her, or even had forgiven her, why not? Maybe….

The woman shook her head, trying once more to erase the wild thoughts and imaginations that were agitating her mind and robbing her of her painfully achieved inner peace. To her frustration, however, she realised that it was to no avail this time. The irrational, terrible glow was still there, in her eyes, as much as she tried to plunge them in the shadows of the dark chamber. The smile was there in her lips, as much as she tried to smother it under the covers of her futon.

She hadn´t ever imagined that hope could be so terrible.

**_Takani Megumi_**

****

Kaoru looked horrified. In a slow pace, and not before she managed to give a sharp intake of breath, the mortally pale girl started to approach the dojo gate, trying by all means not to step over any of the bodies lying on the floor.

"Please…" she muttered. The wanderer lifted his glance from Gohei, with his eyes a bit widened in surprise. "Please don´t… don´t kill him too."

The man was somewhat flabbergasted at this, and lowered his sword. From where she was, Megumi was able to hear the false Battousai´s sigh of relief.

"They are not dead. "the real hitokiri answered in a voice that came out very hollow. "My blade is reversed."

As if to punctuate his assertion, one of the "corpses" groaned in pain and moved his right arm aside. Now, it was the girl´s turn to be flabbergasted.

"They are all… alive?"she muttered in hopeful disbelief. "No one… has… died, then?"

"No." he confirmed, sheathing his sword and starting to walk towards the gate as well. Megumi could see the dead serious expression in his face as he did so, tinged with a shadow of sadness. "I´m sorry for having lied to you. I didn´t want to scare you, Kaoru-dono. I... will return to wandering now."

"He…hey!" The girl´s countenance went suddenly frantic. Surprised, both the doctor and the wandered froze in place. "Don´t leave, you idiot!"

The red-haired man´s eyes turned big as saucers.

"Kaoru…dono?" he inquired, truly, honestly lost for the first time in Megumi didn´t know how many years.

"You… you said that you didn´t like the true nature of kenjutsu. That you wanted swords to be for protecting people." she exclaimed in a shaky voice. "A.. and then you _did_ it. You protected me without killing anybody. You don´t have to be Battousai… I like you as the wanderer!"

Megumi gasped, and had to undertake great efforts to keep her countenance even after the shock of those words. Was that girl stupid, or what? Even after what she knew, even after what she had _seen_… could she… still…?

"You will never understand. "she said, turning away to leave before a silly irrational hope could start to thrive in her own heart. It was better like this.

_Better for everybody._

"Megumi-san, wait!"

The older woman clenched her fist.

"Opium maker."

Kaoru´s mouth froze in mid-yell.

"…what?"

"That´s what I was in the past, and the reason why they were after me." the doctor explained in a bitter tone. "Himura saved me from those people two years ago. They were my band."

The girl looked down slowly and began to play with the folds of her hakama, clearly overwhelmed by that information. Silence weighted heavy over the trio for minutes, in which the clouds obscured the moon outside and then went it away to let it shine again over the courtyard.

"I´m sorry."

Megumi could not believe what she had heard.

"What did you say?" she asked in a slow, composed voice, turning back to face the girl. She seemed strangely desperate, but not only because of all what she had experienced minutes ago. Something was driving her now almost to the edge of tears.

"I misunderstood you. I---I thought you wanted to leave because you were afraid of the…."Just about to say "Battousai", she rectified just in time, and sent a nervous glance in the direction of the ex-hitokiri."… the man who was threatening me. I didn´t know... I had no idea. Please… stay here a while more."

"Stay?" The woman huffed. She did not want or need any pity, and much less from someone who was so silly as to even grasp the full scope of the situation. "How can you be so stupid as to believe this is _over _for me? The man that you found so frightful was used to be only the beginning of this. You wouldn´be able to imagine the extent of the power, influence and ruthlessness of the people who are after me and, believe me, they _will_ return. Do you still want to die?"

_She doesn´t want to be alone._

"At least…."the girl muttered sadly, kneeling in the midst of the wrecks. "would you stay to help me… to clean this?"

A pair of eyes filled with anguish met Megumi´s, and she almost backed away at the intensity of the feelings of the person she was used to consider as nothing more than a naïve, shallow girl with no worries. Himura-san´s words were coming back to her mind now, reminding her that Kaoru had lost her parents and wrestled with her loneliness while she tried to salvage her dojo and uphold her father´s ideals, that she had trusted everybody blindly because she needed them to be trustworthy… and that now, faced with eveything that had happened in that fatidical night, her shallow surface was crumbling down at last to show her need and her pain.

_That it was not compassion, but a real plea what shone in her eyes._

"I…" she started. She felt a strange warmth inside her, even as she wrestled with the appropriate answer and kept finding clouds everywhere, looming over her immediate reality. "I can´t…"

"I promised I would solve this." Himura´s voice interrupted her all of a sudden. It had sounded strangely eerie, unexpected in the silence of the night, and both women were surprised at the look in his face when he finally turned to face them. There was a smile on his lips, _and also in his eyes_ for the first time. "And I promise I won´t leave until Megumi-dono is safe to stay with Kaoru-dono and Tomoe-dono or wherever she wishes to stay."

Kaoru looked up in delight. How she was able to change her expression wholly in just one moment was something that Megumi wouldn´t ever get, even if she had had the time to wonder about it in the middle of her own feelings of hope and gratitude. Even if it was just for some minutes, she wanted to be absolutely selfish now. She wanted to forget her worry, her dark memories and the knowledge of her past an her burden and just… believe.

_He wanted her to._

"Really?" the girl squealed. "Will you stay here then, Megumi-san, and….and…." Obviously unsure as to how she should call him now, her voice faded away in some awkwardness. The wanderer just smiled, and made a dismissing gesture with his hand.

"My name is Kenshin." he said on a soft, quiet tone. "Himura Kenshin."

(end of first part)


End file.
